Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) 🌟
Genre: Sci-fi/Horror
Release Year: 1971
MPAA Rating: PG
Director: Yoshimitsu Banno
Content Warnings: monster violence, brief human gore, grim tone
This film is a Charpentier’s Choice pick. 🌟
Overview
The original Godzilla series (1954-1975) had waded neck-deep into its family-friendly era when first-time Godzilla director Yoshimitsu Banno stepped in to helm the saga's 11th installment and shake up the scene. Inspired by Japan's aerial pollution and its broader environmental effects, Banno created a smog monster and pitted the fearsome brute against Godzilla. The result was Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971), or Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster (1972), as some know it in the States, and it remains a distinctive picture over fifty years later.
This mind-bending film repels some conventional viewers but continues garnering audience appeal via its experimental look, feel, and style splashed with pulsating colors, a harrowing score, gruesome human deaths, and an agonizing brawl between Godzilla and his alien foe. Waste takes a sentient shape in this epic anti-pollution romp defiant of norms and the typical boundaries that constrain a "good movie."
Plot Recap
It came from the stars! When the Ikeya-Seki Comet hurtles past Earth in 1965, an alien organism detaches from it and lands in the pollution-choked Suruga Bay, Japan, where it begins mutating into a much larger, deadlier entity. Godzilla, alerted to the creature's nefarious presence, comes to destroy it, but the Kaiju King has quite a reckoning in store: Hedorah, Earth's new living chemical factory, doesn't die easily. Worse, it inflicts plenty of demise on the planet's inhabitants with its sulfuric emissions and ever-evolving corrosive body that ruins everything it touches. An intuitive boy (Hiroyuki Kawase), his doctor father (Akira Yamanouchi), and a band of weary military personnel must unite with Godzilla to exploit Hedorah's singular weakness and eliminate him once and for all.
Godzilla fights Hedorah’s “Perfect Form,” Toho Studios
The Charp, the Dull, & the Recommendable
Godzilla vs. Hedorah may look messy at a first showing, with its jarring cuts, abstract visuals, and sludgy guts flying around. The film's tone frequently pivots from childlike to frightening. In one moment, Ken Yano (Hiroyuki Kawase) is playing with his toys and receiving dynamic science lessons. In the next, he's witnessing peoples' reduction to slimy skeletons after Hedorah perfumes the air with his toxicity.
Audiences' chief complaint with Godzilla vs. Hedorah can be summed up in this question: "Who is this movie for?" On one hand, Godzilla, the spirited environmental savior, could be waving around a "Save the whales" sign, but on the other, Hedorah sludge-bombs Ken Yano's uncle in the face and kills him. Is the film recycling propaganda for children or a cautionary tale intended for all ages? One could settle on the latter, but only after several viewings.
Most interesting is how this film's flaws are also its strengths. The tonal shifting disorients and kindles intrigue as to what will happen next; the dizzying nightclub scene, wherein partiers don fish masks, raises eyebrows as much as it does questions; and the film's curious blend of animated sequences, narrated overviews of sludge-smothered waters, dramatic silhouetting, and silent moments draw the eye in wonder. It's as if everything on screen echoes a stunning nightmare or the impassioned wanderings of a feverish mind.
Hedorah gases up, Toho Studios
Godzilla vs. Hedorah excels at establishing an unnerving atmosphere soaked in dull, muted colors and filthy settings. Industrial plants become ominous beacons for Hedorah's caustic presence. The ocean, one of Japan's primary food and revenue sources, turns sick and dangerous, as it houses a violent creature that slowly wipes out fish and tankers (and little boys' fathers' eyeballs). No one is ever truly safe in this threatening new Japan, but perhaps they never were; Hedorah's arrival only reinforces what's already sour in the modernizing nation. It's a whiplash ride, to be sure, but Godzilla vs. Hedorah's clever use of unpleasant, often distorted scenery, messaging, and effects—suffused with Riichiro Manabe's eldritch score—make for a skin-crawling experience.
That's to say nothing of Hedorah itself, proud owner of genitalia-shaped peepers and a body so putrid, it burns the flesh off Godzilla's hand. Hedorah's near-invincibility tightens the film's suspenseful chokehold on viewers. Conventional weapons can't kill it. Oxygen bombs don't suffocate it. Meanwhile, it continues evolving into larger forms and abilities, eventually surpassing Godzilla's size. Such a terrible monster must have a weakness, Dr. Yano reasons, and it does: dehydration. The problem is that Japan's military is too incompetent to kill Hedorah alone with their giant electrodes, so they require Godzilla's help to finish the job.
Godzilla's wounds and exhaustion feel almost palpable and certainly well-earned by the movie's end. He's suffered tremendously to rid the world of a creature mankind created. Mutated from humanity's excessive, poorly handled waste, Hedorah represents our collective thoughtlessness, avarice, and irresponsibility, painting a rather dismal—but deserved—illustration of what destructive stewards we are of the Earth.
When the alien is also a flying saucer, Toho Studios
For all its faults and excesses, Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a bonafide creative triumph and possibly the most disturbing Godzilla series entry. Nothing like it has existed before or since. "A lot of people dying easily — that is the powerful and fearsome phenomenon of the environmental problem, and pollution is getting bigger and bigger," Banno said of his film during an interview. Banno utilized his unusual directing approach to bring that terror full-force in a stylistically stand-out, engaging horror picture that oozes dread and will make you think twice about throwing out that milk jug.
Toho Studios
Verdict
Godzilla vs. Hedorah skirts the careful line separating arthouse achievement from asinine B-movie, resting decidedly on the arthouse side of the aisle. Yoshimitsu Banno, a concerned citizen and dedicated artist, takes an impersonal threat harming his nation and anthropomorphizes it, giving it dimension and personality. Wielding cleverness and creativity, the director made a more powerful statement than the most spirited picketer, standing in the gap for an endangered world in the best way he knew how: with brains and extraordinary talent.
