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Rebirth of Mothra III!!!!

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Rebirth of Mothra III – 1998, Okihiro Yoneda – Japan

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Alright, you guys… This is it. This is the tie breaker! This movie decides the fate of the Heisei Mothra trilogy… So far, we’ve got a kick ass first film and one sucky ass sequel. Rebirth of Mothra III is destined to tip the scales and be the deciding factor; will this trilogy will follow the Indianna Jones model (two rad films sandwiching a less than awesome middle movie) or if it will go the way of the Matrix franchise (one classic followed by two humiliating turds.)? There’s a lot riding on this film. What’s it gonna be, Toho? Can Rebirth of Mothra III salvage this series!?!

And the answer is: Well… Kinda. I guess.

The PLOT: Belvera, the villainous sister of our two tiny singing Mothra Maidens, hatches what must be her two billionth plan to rid the Earth of humans once and for all, and this time her evil scheme involves summoning King Ghidorah, here identified as the King of Terror, to come do her dirty work for her. Apparently, Ghidorah is actually the force which drove all dinosaur life to extinction way back before recorded history, so Belvera figures he’d be really good at doing the same thing to the human race. What she didn’t expect is that Ghidorah’s technique this time around would involve eating all the children of Japan on day one of his dragon occupation, which is pretty brutal. In order to do this, he first sucks them up into the sky using what appears to be magic and somehow transports them into a large, membranous dome, for safe keeping, kind of like a giant kaiju cookie jar. He also uses his evil psychic influence to possess Lora, one of the good little Mothra people, and turns her against her sister Mol. Some lines get crossed this time around that we haven’t seen crossed before, which really elevates the drama. Off to a good start!

Meanwhile, our principle human character is Shota Sonoda, a moody, sensitive boy who, I would approximate to be in the tween or early teen demographic… Can’t say for sure. Anyhow, Shota’s super mopey, and he has recently decided that he just isn’t going to go to school anymore, which, inexplicably, seems to be accepted as a decision he has the right to make by his parents and society. Can you do that in Japan? Just not go to school? Thank goodness you don’t have that option in America. The literacy rate would drop to zero within one generation’s time. Anyway, Shota’s aversion to school actually pays off when Ghidorah pays a little visit to the one place in town that promises the best crop of young’un’s for his giant dragon snack drawer, but his little brother and sister are not so lucky. They get sucked away into Ghidorah’s magical kid transportation device, and Shota decides he’s gotta do something about it.

Shota is also meant to hold together the narrative and provide a connection between the human world and the monster filled world of the Elias (that’s what the tiny women are actually called), which he does effectively. The Elias sisters really do have quite a lot going on in RoMIII, and it’s not inaccurate to suggest that they sort of occupy center stage for most of the film. After Lora has her brain invaded by the cold, menacing stare of Ghidorah and goes all stab happy on Mol, she and Belvera both wind up stuck inside Ghidorah’s Snack pod, destined to be munched up by a nigh impervious, three-headed hell dragon from space in the very near future. That shit ain’t good. Mol is, at this point, at her lowest, and isolated from her two sisters the same way that Shota is from his family, so the two of them happen upon one another and decide to join forces and summon Mothra to come save the day. This all sounds promising enough, but we’re coming up on a major hurdle that RoMIII doesn’t exactly clear, so heads up.

You see, other than some unforgivably bad CG, this movie has managed to to kick ass pretty reliably up until this point, but this is the moment where Rebirth of Mothra III really starts to push its luck. It kinda goes without saying that Mothra on his/her best day really is no match for Ghidorah, perhaps the most formidable of Godzilla’s scaley, giant rogues gallery, and understanding this to be true, Mol announces a plan to give Mothra an edge. This plan relies heavily upon…

…Time travel.

Fuck.

The last, and only other time Toho has attempted to work time travel into one of their ‘Zilla-Verse films was the horrible, jaw-droppingly stupid Godzilla VS King Ghidorah, which was released seven years prior. Godzilla VS King Ghidorah made no sense whatsoever, it was an unmitigated disaster, a direct insult to human intelligence, and the single worst time travel film I have ever seen in my life. For Toho to be halfway home with the best instalment of a better than average trilogy and then to borrow so heavily from one of its worst fumbles of all time is a decision I can’t possibly wrap my mind around. Who thought this was a good idea? If I was reading this script my heart would have stopped the first time I saw “back in time” printed on a page. Oh, hell no, not again…

But here we are, with our second Toho film of the 1990’s to include both time travel and King Ghidorah. So… How does Rebirth of Mothra III compare to the epic fart in an elevator that was Godzilla Vs King Ghidorah?

Much, much better, thankfully, but that’s saying almost nothing. Godzilla Vs King Ghidorah suffered from a terminally convoluted plot and time travel that was excruciatingly nonsensical. In this movie, they handle the basic concepts involved with traveling through time much better (as in, the movie doesn’t seem like it was written by a six year old), but the story is still plagued by strange and embarrassing lapses in basic logic. Truth time: Toho should just stay the fuck away from time travel. No good has ever come of it, they just don’t seem to understand it, and they sure as shit don’t know how to use it in a story. I love that studio, and I make this statement out of a desire to see them do well, but so far, these attempts at time travel movies have been shameful detours into a world of madness and stupidity, and I just think enough is enough.

Anyway… Mothra goes back in time to throw down with a slightly younger Ghidorah, who is, at that time, munching down on some super dumb looking dinosaur hand puppets. The two monsters start to kick one another’s ass, and we periodically cut back to present day, where we see Ghidorah thrashing about in pain, basically the time travel equivalent of “Oh, I remember when that moth dude fought me back in the Cretaceous era, I’m really upset about that now!” Amongst all of this commotion, fire, death, destruction, and kidnapped, hysterical Japanese children, Belevera suddenly has her moment of clarity. Apparently, when she worked tirelessly toward a species wide genocide for all those countless centuries, she just wasn’t really thinking it through. Now that it looks like she managed to actually pull it off, Belvera starts get’s cold feet and opts to pull the plug on the whole deal.

This is a major emotional beat in the movie, and it’s what basically justifies the argument that Belvera is our main character. Now totally a good guy after all, Belvera does a historic flip flop back to Team Mothra, thereby uniting all of our principle cast against the menace of King Ghidorah, who currently getting his ass kicked millions of years ago by Mothra, but only just now is reacting to it, apparently.

Back in the Dino-Days, Mothra manages to toss Baby Ghidorah into a volcano, a means of monster disposal with a less than stellar success rate, but we still pretend that this was a victory and that Ghidorah is totally dead. The cost was high, however; critically injured in the showdown, Mothra crashes into the Earth, essentially down for the count. He/She/It is soon saved by the mercifull cocoons of some wiggley little Mothra Larvae who happen upon him/her, and there Mothra waits, cloaked in the nourishing embrace of caterpillar silk. until present day, when he can explode out of the Earth like a shiny, winged Jack-In-The-Box.

So, things seem all good with our happy little characters back in modern day Japan, but everyone is a little confused about how they even know who Ghidorah is if he had been killed millions of years ago. I count this as a major victory, because it illustrates a much more advanced understanding of what going back in time would actually do than was ever evident in the aforementioned Godzilla Vs King Ghidorah, which was, again, the ramblings of a simpleton made celluloid, and I totally am willing to dismiss the fact that if King Ghidorah was the thing that killed off all the dinosaurs, then killing him back in the Cretaceous period would therefore result in a future still dominated by giant lizards and humans probably wouldn’t exist. That’s, like, the kind of stuff Toho will learn about in school next year, but at least they’re progressing.

Suddenly, and in an abuse of common sense which is mild in serverity, a firey, volcano charged King Ghidorah suddenly appears in the center of a floating ball of flame, and all the kids get zapped right back into his alternate universe dragon cookie jar or whatever. “Oh, shit, what now?!” Everyone says. Just then, a mountainside gives way, revealing Mothra’s ancient cocoon, and it cracks open to reveal a new, shiny, super Mothra, which kicks Ghidorah’s ass. This final Mothra redesign feels lame and over the top to me. If the four winged Mothra from the last movie is X-Wing Mothra, this is basically Jason X Mothra. Anyway. So, super metal future Mothra kills Ghidorah, oh boy, happy ending.

From an early point it’s obvious that this was a movie with a lot more talent behind it than Rebirth of Mothra II was, and you can really feel the jump in quality just pouring out of the screen from the very start of the picture. Without question, we’ve left that regrettable middle child of a film in the dust, and that’s excellent news. As for wether or not this beats the first film in the trilogy; I think the jury is still out, but it’s close. The foray into time travel is a hard blow to overcome, it’s not a mortal wound exactly, we can cope, but this thing would have been King of Mothra mountain and now it really can’t make that claim. As for how the rest of the film holds up, many of the effects are pretty lousy, which is par for the course from Toho’s post Showa output, but it’s shot really well and the plot feels much more dramatic, which is excellent. The time travel thing really is RoMIII greatest flaw, but beyond that, it’s one of Toho’s better films out of the 1990’s, and it’s certainly better than many of Godzilla’s more recent adventures.

The themes we see in Rebirth of Mothra III are, much like the first film, themes of unity, and the reconciliation of the family. Our humans, the Sonoda family, are a refreshing departure from the Gotoh family (our characters in the first movie), because they’re not in the least bit fractured by emotional issues or inter-personal drama. This is a family who is close emotionally, and so they are instead separated physically, by a damn dragon. Regarding our other characters, we get a much closer look into the family drama facing the three Elias sisters than we have in the past, and the film is very much about the redemption of Belvera and the healing of whatever rift tore the three of them apart to begin with, which is interesting. Oddly enough, RoMIII is much less interested in exploring environmental ethics than it’s two predecessors, which is a curious switch up. Up till this point it seemed like this was Toho’s Eco-concious fable trilogy, but those ideas have been pushed way off into the background here, for whatever reason. I don’t miss them, honestly.

It’s pretty strong, all in all, but Rebirth of Mothra III suffers from it’s time travel gaffs and would have been better off without the over-complication. Still recommended!

B-

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REBIRTH OF MOTHRA II!!

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Rebirth of Mothra II – 1997, Kunio Miyoshi – Japan

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When Toho kicked off it’s brand new Mothra franchise, they really started off on the right foot. Rebirth of Mothra was an excellent kaiju adventure which was geared for kids, but remained entertaining for adults, and which managed to carry an effective message of environmental consciousness without coming across as too preachy or obnoxious. That’s a hard balance to strike, and they pulled it off; Rebirth of Mothra was a surprisingly solid effort which I really enjoyed. For Rebirth of Mothra II, we get the embarrassing dud we expected out of its prequel; and it sucks super, super hard. This thing fumbles at every turn, so strap yourself in for a rocket ride to dudsville, everybody.

THE PLOT~ Three school children Goonies their way into a grand adventure involving a lost, sunken temple, ancient cursed treasure, a big pollution monster, and magical furby pee. Then Mothra shows up and kills a boring sea dragon. Roll credits.

That’s about it. It feels slapped together, and the Mothra sequences feel tacked on. It’s so haphazard that it really could have been a non-Mothra script about a bunch of kids on some crazy adventure that just wasn’t panning out, so they slopped on a well known Kaiju and called it a sequel. The adventure angle makes this movie feel like a weird, sucky Atragon, but without the submarine, or really anything that made me love Atragon. It even references the Lost Continent of Mu, so clearly, the writers did have Atragon on their mind when they cobbled together this clown-party, but it’s not enough, and what we get is just a sham of a movie.

This time around, Mothra’s up against Dagahra, which is sort of a dragon/stingray combo type thing, but that sounds cooler than it is. He just doesn’t feel that special, or that well concepted. Apparently, his thing is that he eats up pollution (oh, that’s good, right?) and then poops out evil, murderous starfish creatures (there’s the catch, we don’t want those Starfish creatures around), so he totally needs to be stopped, obviously, but the movie does an extraordinarily poor job of establishing that the environment is even that polluted to begin with. This really needed to be conveyed SOMEHOW, and it just wasn’t. Not well. I don’t think it’s out of line to call this the single least effective environmental fable in the extended Zilla-Verse. Boo, Rebirth of Mothra II! Boo!

And then there is Mothra himself- that’s right HIMself. The Mothra in this film, I have learned, is Mothra Leo, the son of the Mothra we all know and love; making this the first mothra in Toho history which is expressly noted as being male. Honestly, this gender switch up sucks, Mothra being female was always a huge part of her charm, and this just feels like an unnecessary change that makes the character that much less unique. All these monsters are dudes, let’s leave at least ONE lady in the fray.

The worst part of the movie comes at the end, in the final showdown between Mothra and Dagahra. Mothra, like, morphs into what I call an X-Wing Mothra, and then splits off into countless tiny X-Wing Mothras, so he/they can fly into Dagahra’s mouth and zoom around until they reach the reactor core and target it with their photon torpedos. That may have been Return of the Jedi, actually, but the same exact thing happens in Rebirth of Mothra II, so what the fuck ever. Then, the squadron of X-Wing Mothras exit the exploding Death Star/Dragon/whatever, and rejoins to form normal X-Wing Mothra Leo, and then morphs back to non X-Wing Mothra, meaning that Mothra’s X Foils are not permanently locked in attack formation, he can apparently revert back and forth whenever the movie needs to get stupider. It’s fucking lame. Fun fact; people have liked Mothra since the 50’s, and we don’t need to have her transformed into a dude which is shaped like a spaceship. You ruined everything, Toho.

Our three kids, meanwhile, are tasked with surviving the bumbling antics of two adult thieves, who have become Belvera’s newest henchmen, but their actual purpose is to illustrate to us the evils of human greed, and consequences thereof. None of that matters, because this message is lost due to how horribly disinteresting and poorly done the film is. You’ll be happy it’s over, and you’ll take nothing with you, Rebirth Of Mothra II is boring, ineffective, and overly childish to the point of being obnoxious, and frankly, it damages Mothra’s proud legacy.

Turdsville!
D

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Rebirth of Mothra!

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Rebirth Of Mothra – 1996, Okihiro Yoneda – Japan

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Everybody’s favorite giant ass, benevolent bug monster returns in this much-better-than-you’d-expect solo outing from the heart of the 1990’s, A.K.A.; The Heisei Period. It’s weird, by and large, Godzilla’s career in the this era hasn’t been all peaches and popsicles, in fact, some of those movies downright suck like crazy… but so far, based on the strength of this movie, Mothra is doing substantially better. I guess it’s too early to judge, though, this did end up being a trilogy, so we’ll see how well our big, furry bug buddy holds up three movies deep.

THE PLOT ~ Taiki and his sister Wakaba don’t get along. Neither do their parents, dad works long hours overseeing the logging/mindless destruction of precious natural sites, for the purpose of building parking lots, torture chambers, or slaughterhouses, presumably, and their mother stays home all day fabricating reasons to be angry at people, mostly their father, because fuck that guy. Then we have the two tiny, singing fairy ladies who live on Infant Island and serve as stewards to Mothra; their roles have been greatly expanded upon in this film, and in many ways drastically altered. In the past, these characters have been relatively singular in personality, lacking individual characteristics and instead operating in a more enigmatic, ethereal manner. In the case of Rebirth Of Mothra, they are now given individual personalities and names, Mona and Lora, respectively, and they no longer are of one mind on everything. In fact, they occasionally disagree. Additionally, these two decades old characters have also gained a third sister, Belvera, who is basically Rita Repulsa, but five inches tall. She’s the bad guy here, she rides on a little dragon. Full disclosure; I like Belvera.

So, one day, dad, who, again, works all the time, fuck that guy, right? He’s never home, he’s always off working really hard to pay for our groceries, the kids’ college fund, our mortgage, all our bills- What a dick! Anyway. He and his stalwart crew of Earth-murdering land developers happen upon a mysterious ancient site, which, unbeknownst to them, is the enchanted prison of a giant, gnarly dragon monster. Pops, again, thinking only of himself, pries a tiny, circular seal off of this archeological treasure with the intent of gifting it to his daughter Wakaba, but again, what a dick, in so doing, he weakens the prisons hold on Desghidorah, the aforementioned dragon, and it’s now only a matter of time before this beast busts loose. Desghhidorah is kind of cool, it basically looks like a grey, quadrapedal version of longtime Godzilla arch-villain King Ghidorah. They must be related.

So, dad returns home to the angry, frozen embrace of his eternally dissatisfied wife and gives the seal to his daughter as a necklace, which, unbeknownst to mom and dad, makes her the target of Belvera, who is super excited about setting Desghidorah free… For some reason. She hate people, I guess. Lora and Mona intervene, and they end up dogfighting with Belvera in a miniature moth/dragon aerial shootout that would be a lot cooler if the CG in ’96 wasn’t so PBS looking. Long story short, Belvera gets away with the seal, which is now a magical amulet, and sets Desighidorah loose. Lora and Mona summon Mothra, who is getting on in years, and she flaps her giant, furry groove thing on over to face an opponent that seems laughably more intimidating than she is. Mothra is, in turn, rewarded with a furious ass kicking, as she so often has been throughout her life.

In all the fury and dragon lasers, Mothra’s offspring, somehow sensing momma moth’s distress, busts forth from it’s egg prematurely, and wiggles it’s tiny larval form off to her rescue. Unrealistically, this infant caterpillar arrives at the scene of the battle more of less instantly, and attacks Desighidorah in a truly valiant fashion, only to then be deal a most savage beat-down in return which nearly kills it. Momma Mothra and her little Larva somehow escape with their lives, but as soon as they’re clear from the immediate threat of three-headed dragon attack, Mother Moth-Monster dies anyway, and sinks dramatically into the ocean. This is meant to be a a real emotional beat in the film, and it’s sort of embarrassing how effective that is. You really have to remind yourself that it’s a damn puppet in a swimming pool and not an actual guardian monster sacrificing her life for her offspring, but even so, you may get a little bummed out.

So, baby Mothra cocoons into a fully developed Moth monster, beats Desigidora’s ass, saves the day, and somewhere between fighting to save one another and baring witness to the glorious splendor of monster combat, the Goto family finds themselves closer than they have been in years, and all old grievances are forgotten, because, as I learned in couples counseling, “the family that survives a dragon attack together, stays together.”

So, there are a couple themes at play here, and none of them are subtle. The first, and most important (in the scheme of the film) is the importance of family, and the healing of strained familiar relationships. This is showcased most plainly in our central characters, the Goto family, and then repeated in the sisterhood of Lora, Mona and Belvera, and then again between Mothra and her offspring. The message of Rebirth of Mothra isn’t the least bit cynical, it is one of forgiveness and compassion, but the movie also has a three headed dragon that fights a caterpillar in it, so don’t be too turned off by its touchy-feeling nature.

The other theme is that of environmental conservation, which is secondary to the family unit theme, yet still extremely heavy handed and blatant. The movie is so Pro-Environmentalism that Al Gore keeps it in a secret drawer that his wife doesn’t know about, for night’s when he’s home alone and feeling frisky. Even so, if you aren’t especially into the whole “conservation thing,” it doesn’t go so over the top that it’s obnoxious, like Avatar does.. If you made it through that chore, you can make it through Rebirth of Mothra, piece of cake.

From a technical standpoint, Rebirth of Mothra is a mixed bag, but it’s still better than most of Godzilla’s recent pictures. What we have here are a bunch of practical effects which are mostly really good, and and a bunch of CGI that sucks really badly. There is one area where Rebirth of Mothra shines like the Arc of the Covenant, though; and that’s its pyrotechnics, holy shit, there are so, so, so many explosions in this movie, and they actually look super awesome. This is what I thought a Kiss concert was going to be like before I ever saw one. There are flames launching every direction, blasts of light exploding out of the Earth- I would normally discourage people from being all that charmed by what amounts to little more than a sophisticated fireworks display in a feature film, but whoever is responsible for these righteous fireball effects deserves a serious raise. Good job dude. How many moth puppets got scorched beyond usability during this shoot? It had to have been dozens.

There is also some pretty good photography, particularly in the third act, and for the most part, I was surprised how good Rebirth of Mothra ended up being. Really, the biggest issue you may have with the film is that, unlike the Heisei era Godzilla films, many of which took on a darker tone and more mature themes, this solo Mothra film is undeniably aimed at a younger audience. In fact, this is a kid’s movie- and that’s clear as day, my friend. For some of you, I expect that disqualifies it altogether- but if I was a kid I would love this thing. Even as an adult I really enjoyed it, I feel like it closely captured the spirit of Toho’s Showa era films, and the changes made to Mothra lore didn’t particularly turn me off- Toho has often shown little regard for continuity in the first place.

Highly recommended for younger audiences, especially those who dig on some of the Hero Godzilla films of the 60’s and 70’s, and actually, I would recommend this anyone who likes kaiju films at all. Lighten up, everybody, Rebirth Of Mothra is a good time!

A-

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