Alternate Titles: Godzilla vs. Megaguirus: G Annihilation Strategy
Year: 2000
Director: Masaaki Tezuka
Special Effects Director: Kenji Suzuki
In The Suit: Tsutomu Kitagawa (Godzilla), Minoru Watanabe (Megaguirus)

The army tries to kill Godzilla but instead a new monster shows up and Godzilla fights it instead. Oh, was that the plot of the last movie? Well, sorry, but it's the same thing this time. I mean, i know it's a Godzilla movie, so from a certain point of view that's been the plot of every movie since Raids Again, but i do feel like the movies have gotten more formulaic during the late Heisei and early Millennium eras.

That said, the monster this time is pretty great. I mean, she's a bug, and we did just have Battra not too long ago, and interestingly the next completely new monster that will appear in a Godzilla film (the MUTOs from the 2014 American film) are also bugs. But she presents some unique challenges for Godzilla, and the mix of CGI and models is an improvement over the last one, and there are some cool fight sequences this time.

You know what i wanted Megaguirus to be? A suped up Anguirus, like an evolved Pokemon. Having it turn out to be an insect was disappointing. And i dunno why the 2014 movie had to make yet another bug monster. I miss the days when you'd get a monster with a chicken head and a buzzsaw on its belly. Now we have to be all "realistic" and crap. And MUTO is really THE WORST name they've come up with so far. It's not even a name. It's just an acronym for Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism. LAME..

For the last movie, we noted that the continuity was ambiguous; there were no references to previous films. That's not the case with this one. This time we're told right away that we're in a new continuity. The movie starts off with a recreation of scenes from the 1954 Godzilla film, although with the current look for Godzilla.

It's said that after that, while Tokyo was rebuilt, Japan moved its capital to Osaka. So we've already deviated from history, both real and in any Godzilla continuity.

It then describes a second Godzilla attack that occurred in 1966 and which does not correlate to any existing Godzilla film.

Since Godzilla's attacks were focused on nuclear power plants, in this history Japan has given up on nuclear power and switched to wind, hydro, and solar. But that turned out to not be enough to meet Japan's growing needs, so they began developing a new kind of energy: plasma power. But that led to a new attack in 1996. Unlike the 1954 and 1966 attacks, the film devotes more than just a few clips to the 1966 attack.

Godzilla, you can't fit in there! Stop that!

There definitely wasn't a high tech JSDF in 1996 in this alternate history, and so they try to repel Godzilla with just a squad of troops with bazookas. One of the soldiers, who will turn out to be our main human character, is Kiriko Tsujimora (played by Misato Tanaka). She winds up getting her superior officer killed by refusing to obey orders when he calls for a retreat. Godzilla chases them, and rubble winds up falling on both of them, but killing her commander.

After 1996, Japan banned plasma energy as well.

And i have to tell you, when the movie starts up again in the present day (2001), everything seems fine. No one seems to be hurting for electricity. So, aside from the deaths he may have caused, maybe Godzilla's attacks were a good thing, at least in terms of the environment. But the government obviously doesn't see it that way. For one thing, they're secretly working on another plasma project, which will be revealed at the end of the movie as the explanation for why Godzilla is going to be showing up again. But more immediately, they are working on what can only be called extreme and dangerous measures to deal with Godzilla when he shows up.

To that end, they want to recruit Hajime Kudo (played by Shosuke Tanihara), who runs a little electronics shop.

They've sent Kiriko and another member of the hilariously named G-Graspers to get him.

Hahahahahaha! Nice outfits! And the "G-Graspers?!"

Now this is where it gets a little weird. Hajime currently has an audience of three little kids, and they are amazed to watch him take out some food ingredients, put it under his hat, and have it come out a fully prepared little meal. Pretty cool, right? So Kiriko walks in all suave and condescending, and she ruins the magic for the kids. He's just got some tiny little robots in there, preparing the food. And that's revealed to be true.

And the kids are all like, "Bah, what a let down!", and they leave the store. But ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Inventing little robots that will make you food is EVEN MORE AWESOME than some dumb magic trick. That is AMAZING! Why in the world are we disparaging that?!

Alternate History Japan must be pretty fucking awesome if they can disparage tiny robots that can make food.

So, with his audience ruined, Hajime has no choice but to go with Kiriko back to the G-Graspers base. He learns there that the head of the science department is his old professor, Yoshino Yoshizawa (played by Yuriko Hoshi, who was in both the Showa era Mothra vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster).

The facility ultimately reports to Motohiko Sugiura (played Masato Ibu), a guy that we first saw in the 1996 footage as the scientist unveiling the plasma energy (hint, hint).

I can't stop looking at that huge flower pinned to his jacket. It's ginormous.

The G-Grasper's new weapon to fight Godzilla is also plasma based, but more importantly it's nothing less than a miniaturized black hole.

Oh NOOOOOOOOOO! This is a BAD idea!

Hajime's role is to miniaturize the device that launches the black hole.

They wind up setting up a test run for the black hole gun near the home of a young boy, Jun, who is interested in bug collecting. When he finds that the local roads are blocked off, he just goes through the woods (nice security!) and is therefore able to watch the first test run.

The test run, by any rational measure, should have resulted in the program being shut down. Because after successfully creating a black hole and sucking in a building (and don't ask me where all that mass goes once the black hole disappears) it leaves behind a wormhole (ok, maybe i answered my own question; maybe the mass goes into the wormhole).

The wormhole gets all the reaction of "Hey, cool, those things are theoretical, never thought i'd see one in person". And then everyone wraps up and goes home. Like, seriously? Your gun creates wormholes and that's ok? And you're just going to leave that wormhole there? Unguarded? Yup, yup, and yup.

Shouldn't a test run be performed in a controlled laboratory? Not right near a populated area? Goddamned mad scientists.

Kiriko does notice Jun after the test is over (maybe next time put up a fence around the entire test area and not just a roadblock for your insanely dangerous experiment?). He asks her why a woman would be fighting Godzilla. Excuse me? She doesn't really respond, but she gets him to swear to secrecy on the whole "we let you stand near a wormhole creating black hole" thing.

Later, the kid wanders back to the test site, alone, at night, and as mentioned, it's abandoned and unguarded. So naturally he's the only one around to notice a giant dragonfly flying back into it.

You people suck!

Before it returned home, it left behind an egg (actually, we'll learn that it's an entire clutch of eggs).

What are you doing? Don't touch that! Fnord, if you find some bug eggs in the woods, you don't touch, either.

Sworn to secrecy, the boy tells no one about his egg, and brings it with him when his family moves to Tokyo. Then the egg starts leaking, and the boy starts to get worried. I don't know why he doesn't try to smash it or something. And we'll learn later that he's been given a way to contact Kiriko, so he could have done that. Instead he tries to throw it out in a few places and eventually dumps it into the sewer. Where the little eggs start breaking off from the big one.

Is everyone in this movie a horrible stupid person?

Soon, the sewers are backing up and people are being murdered.

You did this. You horrible, horrible kid.

The crawling bugs start to come out of their husks like cicadas, metamorphosing into flying insects.

Ewwwwwwwwwwww!

Jun eventually does contact Kiriko, and tells her what he's done. Kiriko (wrongly) assumes that an insect was somehow mutated by the test, not that it came through a wormhole. That of course would be just as bad, but either way Kiriko doesn't tell anyone else about this because (i think, it's not stated) she wants vengeance against Godzilla for killing her boss and doesn't want the black hole program to be halted.

I think it's cause she's an idiot.

Jun identifies the flying insect as a Meganula, while the crawling version is the Meganulan.

The Meganulan (and only that form) previously appeared in 1956 Rodan film.

Later, Godzilla is spotted, and the G-Graspers are deployed in their flying vehicle, Fighter Griffon.

They find a giant dragonfly floating in the water where Godzilla was supposed to be.

Godzilla then emerges, and vengeance-driven Kiriko steers right towards him.

She gets tossed into the air...

...and then simply keeps going, swimming towards Godzilla and climbing on his back.

Yes, it looks just as awful in the actual movie as it does in the still shots.

She shoots Godzilla with a tracking device that Hajime devised earlier.

Back at the base, it's confirmed that the giant dragonfly is a Meganula. The scientist goes on to explain that they were around 350 million ears ago in Carboniferous period, and that they normally live in big swarms and are extremely aggressive. No one knows how one of them would show up in the modern era, and of course Kiriko is keeping her mouth shut, even as Tokyo is suddenly flooded.

Cereally? Even if Kiriko doesn't say anything, did you all forget you created a GODDAMNED WORMHOLE like two days ago? Mebbe that's how a 350 million year old bug ended up in the present. You might want to check on that...or not.

It's not really explained why the Meganula result in flooding. Are there so many eggs that the pipes are backing up? Are the Meganula intelligent and trying to recreate a world that they are familiar with? Do the eggs somehow produce water (we did see the egg leaking, which is what triggered Jun to dispose of it)?

And for the second movie in a row, i have to cop to the fact that there's a submarine in this movie, used to search for Godzilla, and it is not sunk.

Stupid Millennium era.

I mean, i don't even know what to believe anymore. How can there be submarines in Toho movies that aren't destroyed? It's like my whole worldview has been put into question.

Oh, there's also a giant death satellite floating in space waiting to rain black holes on Earth.

You are going to open so many wormholes!

That's not something a super-villain did. It was put there by the good guys.

Says you. As far as i'm concerned, Godzilla is always the good guy.

The satellite is called Dimension Tide. That's just begging for wormholes.

The best part is that the satellite is already up there, and then they go and try to get permission from the higher-ups in the government.

Koichi Ueda (from several Heisei era films) playing a military official.

"About that...You know that flooding in Tokyo?"

The officials (rightly!) challenge the safety of the device, and instead of calmly referring the officials to section B4 of the documents they've been surely handed that outline all the safety precautions and fallback plans that have been put in place, Kiriko just makes a distraught emotional appeal along the lines of "Our children shouldn't have to live in fear of Godzilla!". Well, i mean, sure, but how about living in fear of black holes, or of wormholes and the things that come out of them?

Anyway, despite the lack of any hard data, the officials seem to approve the plan. At this point the scientists themselves (Prof. Yoshizawa and Hajime) rebel, saying the project isn't fully ready yet. But Motohiko Sugiura literally just smiles at them and walks away.

Do you think he might be a bad guy? He sure seems like he could be a bad guy. I mean, that giant flower...

I guess it's because of this that Hajime comes up with a program to test the death satellite's operating system. But i don't know why he bothered to animate the little Mii character.

Because it's Japan!

So the G-Graspers *snicker* fly off to deliberately provoke Godzilla to get him to go to an island (which he seemed to be going to anyway).

The Griffon, being animated by CGI, is able to dodge Godzilla's blasts. But other planes just fly directly into his breath weapon. I don't mean they don't get out of the way fast enough. Godzilla breaths, and then the planes fly into it. Part of me wants to say that those deaths are on the head of whoever decided to provoke Godzilla into coming out of the water instead of just waiting until he came out on his own (which he was going to do!) but frankly they are such unforced errors that i can only blame the pilots themselves.

Meanwhile, soldiers back in Tokyo discover a building just covered in CGI.

That is just so gross.

The bugs swarm the city a bit, with the soldiers doing their best to shoot them down. But then they fly off to the island where Godzilla is. Godzilla ponders them as they flutter around him.

And he decides that he don't like it.

Damn skippy.

But there are a lot of them, and they continue to swarm and sting him. It's said that they "must realize he's an energy source".

Godzilla eventually has enough so he just shakes his breath around like it's a can of bug spray.

That kills a lot, but not all, of the bugs. The swarm of bugs was preventing the Dimension Tide satellite from launching its black hole, but as soon as there's a window, the G-Graspers go for it.

As the black hole comes falling down, Godzilla just peers up at it with detached interest.

I kinda like this new Godzilla where he just stares at whatever appears with a "what is this bullshit?" attitude.

It causes a huge explosion and Godzilla is briefly thought dead. But a second later he emerges from the rubble. Did he bury himself? Is he clever enough to have done that? Was there enough time? He won't say. He just looks at the Griffon with a sense of mild disapproval, and then turns and heads towards Tokyo. "Now that you've tried to kill me i guess i'd better go save your asses from the giant monster that you don't even know is coming."

The dumb humans think they "missed" due to the fact that there were still bugs flying around. Guess what? If you can "miss" when you're shooting a black hole, your aim sucks.

Honestly. How are you going to use a weapon that creates black holes and miss? And you missed an 80 meter lizard that was stationary. Mebbe you should have conducted more than that one test where you shot a house from 100 feet away before you went and built a bigger version IN SPACE. Godzilla should let the Meganula eat them. These crazy people are a danger to society.

Meanwhile, some of the bugs that survived and drew energy from Godzilla return to a giant egg? cocoon? that is still under the water, and they transfer their energy to it before dying.

It's later explained that with every clutch, there's the equivalent of a queen. So add Megaguirus to our short list of female kaiju. Why are they always insects? I was a little confused about the egg that we saw earlier, since it didn't look like a giant clutch of small eggs. It looked like one big egg with some smaller spheres on it. I now wonder if the bigger piece was the queen.

I think they're making it up as they go along.

Anyway, the queen form is called Megaguirus.

One very special attribute of Megaguirus is that it doesn't need to flap its wings to fly. It just kind of hovers there. That might have something to do with all these strings.

Now, the flying of, say, King Ghidorah has always been implausible too, but Megaguirus could at least flap her wings a little. What you'd really expect is for them to be buzzing nonstop, like a real dragonfly. We do get a glimpse of that, counter-intuitively when Megaguirus lands on a building.

They used up their CGI budget creating the swarm.

But she only does that to cause destruction, destroying the surrounding buildings with a sonic boom. Not for actually flying. Maybe the idea was originally to use that for flying but it got too complicated.

It is now time for our main event, live from Griffon, it's Godzilla vs. Megaguirus.

Megaguirus' wings seem to be razor sharp. That was demonstrated earlier when she sliced through a building. And now she slices through Godzilla. Who falls down and shakes his head. That's right, big guy. Shake it off and get up. You can do this.

A lot of the fight is CGI and the problem is the same as when Godzilla was blasting at the Griffon. They just jerk the flying object around randomly on the screen to move it away from the blasts. It doesn't look natural at all.

But for other moments in the fight, Megaguirus gets up close and they use an actual model. And that looks better.

Pull her bug arms off and beat her with them!

Megaguirus stabs Godzilla in the gut with her tail...

...and starts absorbing his energy, so that he can't even breath his radioactive breath.

Is that going to be the new theme for the Millennium era? Every friggin' monster Godzilla fights is going to bite him or stab him to steal his life force?

Use your teeth and bite her soft underbelly! Do it!

Megaguirus knocks Godzilla under this building with a big pyramid, which i assume is probably a real place? Except we're in an alternate history here.

Anyway, Megaguirus shows some intelligence by getting Godzilla under that and then knocking it down on him. 'Course, Godzilla's too ornery to quit.

He does have to shake his head clear again.

Megaguirus flies at Godzilla, but at the last second Godzilla ducks down, using his own apparently razor sharp dorsal fins to slice off one of Megaguirus' claws.

Like a samurai!

Then Godzilla uses his tail to grab Megaguirus, and tosses her around.

Fnord: Nice moves, Godzilla!
Min: I love it when Godzilla's sneaky! Oh, she punched you! You gonna take that shit from this stupid bug?

Godzilla then lets Megaguirus stab him in the belly again, but only so that he can grab the tail, pull it out, and plug it into the ground. Then, with Megaguirus stuck there, it's time for the old Superfly Snuka.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Meanwhile, the G-Graspers are trying to get their black hole satellite gun online for another shot. Hajime is using his program to sort it out.

What are you guys doing?

But i'm pretty sure we're here for giant monster fights, not cutesy low res animation. Megaguirus did absorb a lot of energy from Godzilla earlier, and now she releases it as a fireball.

Godzilla makes no effort to dodge, and then stands there stunned for a bit before falling over.

We then go into weird slow camera mode, kind of like a video game with a bad frame rate. But Godzilla manages to grab Megaguirus' tail with his mouth.

He bites the tip of the tail right off. And then right after that, he blasts Megaguirus right out of the sky.

Yeah! Stupid bug.

And blasts her again on the way down just for laughs.

Then the victory roar.

And the victory building smash.

She did stab him the belly twice. And dropped that building on him. Godzilla's just taking his turn.

Actually, i'm just trying to get home. You guys put so much stuff in the way.

Now, while all this was happening, everyone was trying to figure out why Godzilla woke up again in the first place. And we've seen scenes of Motohiko Sugiura acting suspiciously, on the phone with a mystery person and then awesomely sitting at a table coolly smoking a cigarette while everyone else was talking about how Japan wasn't developing any dangerous energy anymore. So when Godzilla suddenly makes a beeline for the Science Institute, people start demanding answers.

And the answer is that Japan did indeed secretly continue developing plasma energy.

Aha! He's the bad guy!

Sugiura defends the decision by saying that plasma energy would bring tremendous wealth to Japan. Prof. Yoshizawa gets him to admit that it would also guarantee him a high position. And then Kiriko decks him and tells him all the deaths that Godzilla has caused are on his head. She's not exactly on the high ground, though, since she kept quiet about the fact that the black hole gun produced a giant insect egg. Are all those deaths on her head?

They're all guilty. All these people on the black hole project.

At the moment, though, Kiriko is more concerned about getting her vengeance on Godzilla (Crazy lady! Haven't you done enough?). The satellite is crashing and burning at this point, but Hajime has managed to get it online. Kiriko has him lock it on her as a target, with the idea that she'll fly the Griffon into Godzilla and the black hole will shoot at them both. And that's what happens.

Godzilla, you're on fire!

Godzilla again just kinda stares up at the black hole as its coming down.

Blast it!

This time, he doesn't immediately emerge from a pile of rubble after it lands, so it's assumed that he's dead.

Pfft. Suckers.

Now i have to admit that i struck out on my predictions for Kiriko. My first guess was that she'd follow the route of so many vengeance obsessed Godzilla hunters before her, and decide at the end that Godzilla really wasn't so bad. Obviously that didn't pan out. My second guess was that she'd die targeting Godzilla, redeeming herself in death for her past failures. But she actually safely parachutes out of the Griffon and into a pool. So by the end of the movie, she's able to show up in Hajime's electronics shop again and re-recruit him to investigate some unusual seismic activity.

Then, in a post-credits scene, we see the boy Jun at school, and then there's an earthquake and we hear Godzilla's roar.

This being the Millennium era, that's not a set-up for the next Godzilla movie. Just a nod to the timelessness and indestructibility of Godzilla.

I mainly focused on the places where the CGI kinda sucked, and we are definitely still in a period where CGI is pretty obvious and pretty bad. But there are times when it works. It was definitely the only way were were going to see Godzilla fight a swarm, which was pretty cool. And i wish they were using CGI to show Megaguirus flying around the city instead of dragging her around on highly visible strings. On the other side of the coin, there is a good use of a physical model of Megaguirus for Godzilla to interact with. All of the biting and stabbing and body-slamming made the end fight feel a lot more like a fun Showa movie than we'd been getting during the Heisei "everybody stand far apart and blast each other with your breath weapons" era. It doesn't seem to be the consensus online, but i'd say this movie is a big improvement over Godzilla 2000. It's a lot of fun.

No more insect monsters, please!

Godzilla Drinking Game
	Someone thinks it's a good idea to drag a giant monster across the ocean on a raft (giant eggs count).
	Attacking planes fly directly at a monster, with no possibility of avoiding a crash even if the monster didn't swat them down.	Forget flying at the monster. They fly directly at his breath weapon.
	People refuse to believe in the existence of a giant monster even though they've already acknowledged that Godzilla exists.
	A submarine explodes.	Goddamn it, Toho!
	Teens have a dance party on a boat. Two drinks/head smacks if they get attacked by a monster during the party.
	The government is completely ineffective when faced with a corporation doing something illegal.
	A humongous lumbering monster manages to sneak up on someone. Two drinks/head smacks if it's the army and they're supposedly using radar.
	A scientist suddenly figures everything out with little-to-no information and explains it all to everyone.
	A monster suddenly grows in size just because.
	People expose themselves to major amounts of radiation with no concern.	Kiriko does swim to and climb on Godzilla, a giant radioactive lizard. But she's so vengeance obsesseed i'm ruling that's a legimate in-story reason to expose yourself to radiation.
	Everyone suddenly knows a monster's name. Two drinks/head smacks if everyone else nods appreciatively and repeats it.
	Army missiles can't seem to hit a 150+ foot monster and instead explode harmlessly around it.
	A woman falls down for no reason.
	Bad dinosaur science. You have to give a little leeway for the time period, but pretending a children's picture book is a scientific journal is always worth two drinks/smacks.	For the purposes of this conversation "bad prehistoric insect science" is close enough. If the various forms of Megaguirus were said to be mutated in some way, that would be fine. But the implication is just that one of them flew through a wormhole from the past and laid some eggs. And, i mean, there were big dragonflies in the perhistoric age, but by "big" we mean a 3 foot wingspan, not Godzilla size.

Monsters Appearing: Godzilla, Megaguirus