Entry 123: "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit" (2008)

The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit

Dear Internet,

                Now, I on the right footing by watching the correct film today.  "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit" is something of a sequel to the original movie.  I say somewhat because the only thing that the two films have in common is the shared monster Guilala.  Beyond that, there is next to no continuity between the two films.  Short of one joke about a Chinese knockoff spaceship named after the ship found in the first film, the monster is the only similarity that the two films have.  The second film also flips the genre it aims for completely upside down.  The original film was meant to be a drama, although how well it meant that goal can be questioned easily.  The second film is a comedy foremost with some political satire heaved heavily on the side.

                The film begins with the G* Summit being held in Japan.  Eight heads of countries have come together to discuss a number of pressing world issues.  As the group continues their discussions, an unidentified object crashes into Sapporo in northern Japan.  From the fiery carnage, Guilala emerges and brings death and destruction to the city.  The eight take it upon themselves to rid the world of Guilala so that none shall live in terror and that their ratings in the polls will go up.  Meanwhile, two Japanese journalists stumble upon a secret cult of worshipers dancing for their ancient god, Take-Majin.  As they push their inquiry further, they find out that it was foretold since long ago that Guilala was to invade Earth.  Humans would be unable to stop the creature.  Only the god Take-Majin could stop the extraterrestrial monstrosity.  The only problem is that the hero-god is nowhere to be seen in mankind's darkest hour.  Will he appear in time to save us?

The chicken from outer space comes back.

                I have probably written a more dramatic summary than any moment of the film itself.  This is because the film takes itself very lightly.  It is a comedy first and a monster film second.  The center of the film's comedy stems from the antics of the G8 group.  Each of the world leaders is an overly stereotypical cartoon character.  The leader of France is a womanizer who ignores his recent marriage.  The president of the USA is an idiot that cares more about his chances of being reelected than stopping the monster.  The Russian leader utilizes spy tactics to get the job done.  So on and so on, the film lays on these stereotypes to make the audience laugh.  It works quite well because the film does not take any sort of serious jab at anyone in particular.  Even the prime minister of Japan gets made fun of, having to run off to the bathroom constantly throughout the film due to indigestion.

                Beyond the comedy found in the war room, the film makes sure to carry over the silly shenanigans to the Guilala scenes.  The Japanese are the first who attempt to combat the creature by aiming a high powered missile straight at the creature.  This ends up being a poor idea.  Guilala catches the missile before it makes contact and eats the weapon hungrily.  After this, the various other world leaders try one after the other to destroy the beast.  Each manner reflects the comical stereotypes of each country.  I will not ruin any sort of surprises because the effect and failure of each one is a great punch line to each joke.

                There is one major problem with the film.  It stems from the film's subplot or side-plot.  The two journalists take a considerable amount of screen time thought the film.  They find the secret shrine, interact with the mysterious villagers, and find out about Take-Majin.  It all adds up to a good level of exposition to let Take-Maijin appear from out of nowhere.  However, despite their importance to generating information so that the audience can see how the day will truly be saved, they do not really do anything that affects the plot.  Sure, they eventually join the ritual dance, but their dancing is not made clear to have been the tipping point to getting Taka-Majin to appear.  For all we know, the ritual dance would have summoned the hero-god without the help of the two journalists.  They are only there as some sort of audience avatar to see the attack of Guilala from eyelevel.

                The inability of the journalists to make a bigger impact upon the story is not the biggest problem.  The problem is that it acts too much as a cold contrast to the comical half of the film.  Whenever the film covers the G8 Summit, laughter abounds.  There are sly jokes on the side that can be missed and other outlandish ones that are enough to bust a gut.  When the film turns to the reporters, there are no jokes or any sort of silliness.  The tone of the film shifts to being dramatic.  It is not overly dramatic to the point of being a joke itself, but the effect is that the film feels split in two.  It feels like the film was written by two different people.  One wrote the G8 Summit half and the other concentrated on the reporters.  At least it seems that the G8 writer had done the final fight between the two giants.  While the contrast between the two halves are never enough to feel like the film is a pendulum moving in great swings from one extreme to the other, it feels like more of a missed opportunity for there to have been humor in both halves.  The only joke that even comes from the journalist half has to do with the funny dance that is in the ritual.  This joke gets old fairly quickly because of how often it repeats.

                "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit" is a good film if you want to watch a world political satire film.  It is a great film if you want a comedy about government incompetence.  It is an OK film to watch a monster destroy the countryside.  It is very enjoyable even without having watched the first film.  That last bit is probably the most important thing I can say about the film.  The sequel is not a parody of the first, despite the amount of available material to make fun of.  It is a general fun film.  Not even the stiff acting of the English speaking actors can detract from the film.  If anything, the stiff and poor acting makes the scenes funnier a la "The Skeleton of Cadavra," a parody film about bad horror films of old.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next is "The Sword with No Name" (2009).

Entry 122: "The X from Outer Space" (1967)

Dear Internet,

                For starters, I have to clear up a mistake first.  I did not watch and will not review "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit."  Now, before you start to jump on me and begin to start throwing mud at me, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.  One of the rules of this experiment is that I must have viewed previous works that come before anything I review.  This means that before I could have watched "The Monster X Strikes Back/Attack of the G8 Summit," I must have watched "The X from Outer Space" first.  I have not seen the first film before, so I changed up the film for the day to fix this.  Tomorrow I will follow up with the sequel.  

                "The X from Outer Space" is another one of those giant monster films from across the sea in Japan.  There are miniatures, a guy in a rubber suit, and a horrible English dub that only ended up highlighting the film's flaws than convey the story.  The film begins with a space expedition to Mars, via the Moon, to determine what forced five other crews to end transmissions and go missing.  As they travel into the void of space, the crew find themselves held captive by a magnetic interference by a UFO.  After being held in place for some time, the UFO departs.  The crew finds some unknown compound affixed to the tail of their spaceship.  Cleaning off the material yields a small circular object that the crew brings back to Earth for examination.  In the wee hours of the night, the object disappears with a strange footprint found nearby.  Later, a building tall creature begins to wreak havoc upon the Japanese mainland as it feeds on electricity and radiation.  The only hope lies upon re-creating the compound that will cause the creature to revert to an egg state.

                This might not seem like such a bad premise if it was not for everything that I left out.  The film revolves heavily around the crew more than the monster.  This is not a bad thing upon itself.  The original "Godzilla" remembered to center its story on a cast that pushed the story along more than the monster.  The problem here is that the cast of characters are unbelievable to the point that their behavior breaks the storyline.  There is a four man crew that pilots the spaceship AAB Gamma.  I remember the name of the ship because it is repeated throughout the film whenever a radio call goes out from the ship, Earth, or the Moon base, usually three times in one breath whenever it is mentioned.  The crew of the ship often disregards the orders of the captain, trying to do what they think is best instead of doing what they are told.  Take for example the replacement doctor that has to replace the first doctor who turns ill when traveling in space.  The replacement is reluctant to go on the mission to the point that he might have been considered to be insubordinate already.  When he travels with them in space, the ship gets caught in the magnetic beam, making the ship stay still despite the efforts of the ship's rockets.  The captain decides to not use the rockets because they are ineffective and the use thereof will eat up vital fuel.  The replacement doctor decides that this is not the best idea, runs to the ship's controls, and burns through the rest of the ship's fuel.  Or how about we take the ship's biologist.

                The ship's biologist, named Lisa, is the most memorable character.  This has less to do with her influence on the story and more to do with the fact that she is the token white blond character who sticks out like a sore thumb in a cast of Japanese actors and one or two other white guys.  I do not mind that she is a Western character in a cast of Eastern actors. Making a film about space travel would, and does, require an international level of communication and cooperation to create a sense of believability.   I do not mind that she is one of only two women in the cast.  What I mind is that she is one of the most stereotypical lady-scientists that I have come across.  When the crew is told of how they are going on a mission to determine what caused five other crews to go missing and that they have a high chance of following suite if they are not careful, the film quickly switches gears to one or two of the rest of the space crew swooning over her.  They were just told that there is a good chance of them all dying, but the film wants to interject some comical romantic banter that shows the entirety of the pervious discussion did not sink into their heads.  When they are in space, she does not like to take orders from the captain, wanting to treat the sick doctor instead of rushing him to the base like the captain wants.  When they want to go outside the ship to investigate the goop, she refuses to stay behind like instructed and goes out to examine the material.  Eventually, another woman appears that has some interest in the ship captain.  The female jealousy meter goes off more than the Geiger counters in this film before the final conclusion.  Then there is the whole incident where her leg gets pinned under some fallen debris.  Less than five minutes after a team of people get her out from under, she is walking around pretty comfortably for what had appeared as a broken leg.  She makes a few advances in the plot by actually analyzing the various compounds, but those moments are glossed over more for the scenes that highlight her femininity rather than her intelligence.

                The film's special effects are a big problem.  The miniatures are done well enough that you will "Ooo" and "Ah" at seeing a mountain explode and get excited when seeing the tanks roll in. The rest of the sets are enough to make you laugh at the film rather than with it.  In numerous spots in the film, there are computer consoles that operate machinery.  They all are a maze of unlabeled buttons, glowing lights, and knobs.  Nothing seems to have any sort of real purpose other than to give the impression that the workers know what everything does.  The only identifiable item on any console was on the spaceship.  There was a gauge that appeared similar to a turn and balance indicator or a gyro horizon on a plane.  It showed the amount of rocking that was occurring on the ship at any one time.  This leads to one of the most notable problems with the film.  Every time the ship is traveling in space, it rocks back and forth as if it were on the ocean.  The camera tilts back and forth to drive home this point to the point that I began to feel seasick at one point.  The characters even stumble a bit from this swaying motion.  Maybe it is a side effect from having artificial gravity in the ship, but it is hardly better than when there is no gravity and objects "float" around like being held on fishing wire.  

It was probably next to the cup holder.

                The film's monster is not much better.  In fact it is probably one of the worst looking Kaiju I have seen.  It has the head of a tropical parrot, arms that look like they are made from a flat worm, antennae from a bug, and is pudgy in the limbs.  The final effect is a laughable monster that at least is able to destroy the various tanks and airplanes that came after it.  That is not much of a compliment considering that every other Kaiju can do that as well.  Occasionally, we see the monster Guilala attacking people in the same screen.  At that point you can cue the off scale hand or foot that reaches in from off camera, sometimes at the wrong angle from where the limb would have been located for that shot.  Guilala at least has a large enough amount of abilities to make it feel unique at first.  It absorbs a number of different energy forms to power itself, has a fireball breath, and is neigh invulnerable short of one Achilles heel chemical.  Other than the one unique weakness, it feels too much like the Godzilla of later films that feeds off nuclear energy to heal itself.  This might have more to do with the time placement of when this film was made, so I will not discount this against the lumbering beast.

Our lumbering behemoth chasing a car.

                The film's music is always out of place whenever the spaceship is showcased.  There is some ska/lounge music/easy listening song that plays during these moments that completely subtracts away from the space age theme that the film is trying to go for.  This rolls into the scenes that the characters are lounging around or attending celebratory parties.  These scenes are dated straight to the time that the film was in production as a showcase of the fads of that time.  Retrospectively, they make the film show its age.  Looking at the film even within the context of a space film makes it seem out of place because there is no indication that the timeframe of the story is thrown into the future.  It is like assuming that ladder sunglasses are still a thriving trend forty years from now.  

                "The X from Outer Space" should have stayed there.  It is a laughable film that is not notable for anything but its faults.  The film fails in everything it tries to do and forgets to entertain.  I found myself bored and hoping that the monster would stampede over everyone.  I do not think anyone even died, short of those five unnamed crews before the film began.  Worse than that, the film completely ignores the UFO that repeatedly interfered with the spaceships.  Was it some sort of alien bouncer keeping the humans from getting into Club Mars?  We will never know, nor does the film even acknowledge their presence at the close.  The film mutely says, "Just ignore it," something that I would exactly say about this film.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

Entry 078: "Destroy All Monsters" (1968)

Dear Internet,

                Well, I made a bit of a mistake yesterday.  The title of the film today does not have Godzilla in the name, but it is called "Destroy All Monsters."  Godzilla plays a part in the story, but there is more to it than that.  The film marks the 20th Toho Kaiju film, which is remarkable considering that this film came out only after 14 years from their first giant monster film "Godzilla."  That means the company exceeded a single Kaiju film per year during that time.  On top of that is the wide variety of monsters that the company created.  A majority of those creatures come back or make appearances for this film.  Eleven of these colossal terrors come together for this smorgasbord movie that celebrates the series of science fiction monsters.

                Of course, having all these monsters come together requires a workable plot or reason for why they share a similar story.  Enter the hypothetical future of the year 1999.  Here, the monsters have been gathered to live peaceably, far from civilization on tropical islands.  The different monsters are kept from leaving the islands through the use of specialized equipment tailored to each monster's weakness.  From smoke screens to magnetic fields, there is no danger of these creatures escaping to destroy any more cities.  After this 20 yearlong effort, a select number of scientists are allowed to study the creatures in a research facility on the islands.  One day, a mysterious yellow smoke appears and knocks both the scientists and the monsters out.  Afterwards, a crew is sent into to investigate the disturbance which has also caused all the monsters to leave the island.  When they get there, the crew finds a few scientists that are under the control of the Kilaaks, an alien race that now controls the monsters and scientists through radio transmission and other advanced technologies.  The demands of the aliens are simple: either be ruled under the Kilaaks or face the destruction of civilization by the hands of the controlled monsters.  Will the humans be able to fight against the combined might of numerous titanic abominations and the power of a more sophisticated type of alien technology?

                Thus is the basic plot of "Destroy All Monsters."  It is obvious that to put all the monsters together in one film required something more than just a simple premise of just having them together and making a few stock characters run in terror.  No, by making all the monsters already rounded up and waiting for things to go wrong, the film is able to skip a lot of useless la-de-da and just straight into the good parts--the destruction of cities and them fighting one another.  There is one specific thing that I want to point out that somehow makes the film prophetic.  When Godzilla is sent to destroy a city, he is sent to New York City.  The film is supposed to be occurring in 1999.  It is somewhat humorous considering the 1998 "American made film "Godzilla" that had the giant destroy that same city.

The scene only lasted about two minutes in total.

                The visuals are classic Toho.  The miniatures are fun and work well.  I am still impressed every time the ground opens up to swallow a hill or mountain into a sinkhole.  The buildings are more than just boxes with only the outer shell being constructed.  They include interior floors that also fall apart when a Kaiju rips through them.  The monsters themselves include a variety of suits that run the gamut of being either very intimidating to being downright laughable.  This is coming right after "Son ofGodzilla" and Minilla makes a repeat appearance.  At least his importance and influence in this film is minor compared to that of the previous film.  The set elements probably take the cake for the level of corn thrown into the veggie salad that is this movie.  From laser guns that look like derringers to mind controlling pearls inserted behind the ear, the film pulls out all the stops in trying to make the story come alive while still retaining a self aware level of how campy the plot really is.  For example, the aliens place radio transmitters across the globe, hidden in various places including coconuts and giant clam shells.  They are not even hidden very well, which is evident when an elderly man stumbles upon one and brings it to the local police station for identification.  You would think that an advance group of extra-terrestrial beings could think of hiding their devices in better places.  The costumes are even more outlandish with their design.  The Kilaaks are dressed in silver caped outfits that are covered in sequins, but the best has got to be the spacesuits for the main human cast.

The look like Lego people wearing their birthday suit.

                The music is wonderfully orchestrated and pulls from the various previous films that the various monsters come from.  Although I did not hear the original Godzilla theme song in a standalone format, numerous other iconic songs seem to weave themselves into the soundtrack as well as some well done original pieces.

                There is not much I can say against "Destroy All Monsters."  This is not because it is a perfect film.  The characters are rather forgettable and some even seemed to merge together in my mind.  There are really only two memorable characters but they are reduced to "the guy" and "the girl."  Beyond those two, everyone is playing their part in a typical monster film.  There are the generals, the reporters, the other scientists, and the fleeing crowds of people.  One thing that has always struck me as being weird is how willing the press is able to sympathize with the military officials and obey what they are told to do.  The general will say something along the lines of "We do not have any information, so please try not to create a panic."  The journalists comply constantly and do not question the lack of ability of the Japanese military.  If this was taking place anywhere else, the journalists would be trying to break down the doors with questions, yelling over one another, and then print reports about how the military is incompetent and unable to protect the nation.  It must be a Japanese thing.  There are a few non-Japanese actors who deliver Japanese lines and at least do not feel out of place, but I cannot say at how well they deliver those lines.  The length is pretty good considering that even at 90 minutes it felt like much longer but not in a bad way.

                The film mostly is just trying to be an entertaining mash-up of different monsters.  In this way, it succeeds.  However, it does not try to be anything greater than a Kaiju fan's dream film, putting all the various monsters together in the same scene.  It is not trying to talk about some greater moral, deep philosophical point about the nature of man, or something like that, which is actually good to not try to do for such a premise.  "Destroy All Monsters" is a good film for the kid in all of us that likes to see a house of cards tumble apart or watch a line of dominoes fall against one another.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is the "Godfather" trilogy, which I will spread over three days.

Entry 070: The Mysterians" (1957)

Something about that UFO makes me think there are going to be aliens in this one.

 Dear Internet,

                You know what is refreshing, Internet?  A work that does not want me to be depressed or contemplative.  "Saikano" and "Sky Crawlers" wanted to make me feel horrible and failed.  "Rhapsody in August" and "Silmido" wanted to make me think and succeeded.  I doubt "Wii Play: Motion" had any sort of ulterior motive.  Trying to talk about four works in a row that are meant to drain the energy out of the audience is tiring.  Thankfully, "The Mysterians" has a way of energizing the audience, even if it was not trying to.

                "The Mysterians" opens up with a spaceship in outer space of alien design.  Weird things begin to happen near a Japanese village.  First a fire breaks out in the nearby forest, burning in a manner that the residents identify as peculiar before they are burned alive.  Later, the local shrine and surrounding area is swallowed in a massive sinkhole, while radiation levels spike and drop mysteriously.  Finally, a giant robot with laser eyes begins to terrorize the countryside before succumbing to the strength of the military.  When the top scientists organize together to determine the reasons for these series of events, they are contacted by the Mysterians.  They are an alien race who once lived on the now destroyed planet that is now the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.  The Mysterians have a greater understanding of all science than the Earthlings and make two passive-aggressive requests.  The want a strip of land for their own, but more importantly, they want Earth women for species reproduction.

                You do not have to go over that brief summary to know that the film has got enough corn for a whole field.  The film is filled with science-fiction clichés and tropes.  The giant robot I already mentioned is one of the least mobile suits I have seen.  It looks like a cross between a mole and a refrigerator.  When it "shoots" its laser beams, they are about balls of blue energy.  You can see that the film repeats three very bad drawings over the frames in the film instead of a nice beam of some sort.  The various space ships that the aliens use and ones that the humans develop are miniatures that would look more in place in a "Flash Gordon" than on an aeronautical center's drafts table.  One of the best ham-handed scenes is when the humans decide to drop fully built giant satellite dishes mounted to wheeled structures from the sky.  They do not use parachutes to let the structures fall somewhat gracefully to the ground.  No, the satellite structures use jets to gracefully touchdown, completely ignoring the fact that the structures' center of gravity would cause it to fall upside down.

                My favorite cob of corn has got to be when the aliens welcome a select group of scientists to enter their spaceship.  They tell the scientists that the spaceship is somewhat colder than outside.  To remedy this, the scientists are told to wear cloaks.  That is right, cloaks.  So there are the Earth scientists sitting all around a table, surrounded by multi-colored fluorescent tubes of future technology, and wearing full length cloaks with collars that touch their shoulders.  It gets even better when the aliens show up and half wear the same style cloaks, albeit in primary colors.  Why are they lowering the temperature of their spaceship if they are just going to go around wearing cloaks?

I think Edna Mole said it best.

                The message that the film attempts to portray is the classic atomic warning.  If you start to use nuclear weaponry, all it leads to is complete and utter annihilation.  Thankfully, the film does not try to nail it into the viewer too much.  It comes up from time to time, with only three times being notable.  First, when the aliens mention that it is the reason for their planet being gone.  Second, when the idea of using it against the aliens.  Third, at the end of the film when the moral of the day is being recited.  The whole nuclear warning can even be ignored easily so that the film becomes a B-film action flick, which is about all it is good for.

                The miniatures are well made and are able to create a sense of calamity.  When the village is swallowed into the ground by the sinkhole, it is able to show the terror of an entire town being obliterated.  When the aircrafts that the military creates are launched, only a little imagination is required to see the impossible vehicle taking flight.  However, there are a number of things that the visuals get painfully wrong.  As I mentioned before about the mechanized mole, it feels terribly out of place.  This is mostly due to the fact that it is clunky and acts somewhere in between a robot and a giant monster.  It is some sort of hybrid between the two and made me laugh more than fear it.  I have already mentioned the satellites dish structures and how they are immune to the effects of gravity and balance.  The most laughable visual is perhaps the Mysterians themselves.  They are some sort of cross between Pikmin and Power Rangers.

Just wait until they summon their Dinozords.

                Overall, "The Mysterians" does a poor job of reciting a warning, but has fun along the way.  Despite the number of times that the Japanese military fails to attack the Mysterian base, the fact that they are fighting to, tongue-in cheek, "defend the women" is really what makes the audience root for them.  The characters are likable, but bit players playing as character types rather than unique individuals.  While I found the film enjoyable and wonderfully campy, probably because I have been swamped by heavy and depressing items from this backlog, I realize that there is not anything very special or notable about it.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is "Shin Megami Tensei: Persona," provided that I can get it working.  This better not be depressing.