'Mothra is a uh.. sort of a legends sir.'
Welcome back to my Dark Corner of this Sick World
‘Since you’re here now I can’t throw you out’
With the character poised for a big screen comeback, now seems a good time to look at another of Toho’s great monsters
#Mothra#
Mothra,
directed by Godzilla’s Ishiro Honda.
A group of shipwrecked sailors inexplicably survive in a radioactive test area.
‘I think it was the juice that must have protected us’
But when researchers, and one comedy reporter...
‘Hello’ .
..go to investigate, they find more than they bargained for.
‘Why they’re giant abnormal mutations of mould’
Let’s put a pin in that for now, I might come back to it, maybe call Matango.
‘Oh that’s ridiculous’
More importantly...
These tiny women, usually called the fairies, have a simple message.
‘It seems they want their island left alone’
Stop bombing us!
‘Take your atom bomb to another island is that it?’
But of course on expeditions like these there’s always one dickhead out to make a quick buck.
This angers the natives and…
‘Mothra!’
Meanwhile in the big city the film starts channelling King Kong...
'Ladies and gentlemen, we live in the atomic age, are miracles of nature a thing of the past?'
'Do mysteries still exist? Or are they obsolete?'
as the fairies are roped into a stage show…
#Mothra, Mothra#
But they’re not worried as they know someone is coming to save them.
‘Mothra, she’ll soon be here’
That’s a relief, cos we’re halfway through...
'By now we should have seen something.'
and the absence of a giant moth is starting to irk.
Still in the larval stage, I see.
But more than capable of doing damage on her way to pick up the fairies.
‘If you don’t send the girls back to the island, the monster will attack Tokyo’
Don’t they all.
‘And there isn’t anything you can do to stop her’
Except give the fairies back, so why don’t they?
‘Just leave and stop pestering us’
Of course, the dickhead. Here accompanied by his henchmen, giving a fantastic display of bad guy laughter.
There’s also some politics going on which makes the situation marginally more believable than similar ones in Gorgo or Gappa, but…
the good guys fight their way into where the fairies are being kept and…
‘Nothing can stop her now’
Got to go, it’s time for our set. The show must go on!
‘Why don’t we just take them out of the cage, I bet we could fight our way out’
The kid’s right; having fought their way in they seem unwilling to take the obvious next step,
saving, really quite a lot of lives…
as the army battles to take out caterpillarthra.
Who ignores them and spins a cocoon.
'We begin our attack at 10 o'clock.
Which, surely, can only mean one thing.
This is fifteen minutes from the end.
Gotta say, she looked better as a caterpillar, that just looks like a plush toy.
‘Alright, we won’t try that again’
The problem with watching Mothra today is that you do go in with knowledge
and if you’ve come to see a film about a giant moth wreaking havoc, you’d better be very patient.
You certainly wouldn’t call it a bad film, despite the Japanese-Scottish announcer…
‘The monster has now reached the foot of Tokyo Tower. If the tower is destoryed we will broadcast from alternate facilities’
it’s just not the film you might be expecting, which isn’t the film’s fault.
‘So there’s really no point to these accusations is there’
What is the film’s fault is that alongside this comparative absence of Kaiju action
are some unengaging leads without any character development whatsoever.
‘I think all of us agree on that.
’Even the great Takashi Shimura is reduced channelling J. Jonah Jameson.
‘Who said that reporters were not allowed to go on the expedition?’
So what’s the film really about?
‘Its hard to explain how it works’
My personal take – and feel free to disagree – is that Mothra is to Godzilla what Danny Boyle’s Millions is to his Shallow Grave or John Carney’s Sing Street is to Once.
‘What’s that?’
Same basic themes, but for kids!
‘Just how did you get that silly idea?’
I mean a lot of people do get killed…
very preventably...
but its all offscreen and it’s no one we know, so that’s fine for kids.
‘Sayonara’
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What other films do we bring knowledge to that affects them either positively or negatively?
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'Hurry, come on Dad. Come on'