When Godzilla came out in 1954, it was an instant success. So much so that executives at Toho Studios rushed a sequel into production. Godzilla Raids Again came out six months after Godzilla, drew favorable reviews, and made a lot of money. As such, it did what it was supposed to do. But it doesn’t hold up like the original.
Ishiro Honda, director of the original Godzilla, was busy with another movie and was replaced by Motoyoshi Oda. Screenwriter Takeo Murata and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya did return, but if the movie’s a solid piece of machinery for something put together in half a year, there is still a drop in intensity from Honda’s film.
The sequel opens with a pilot named Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki), working for an Osaka-based fishing fleet, who has engine trouble and lands on an island. It turns out the island’s home to Godzilla—not the same monster killed at the end of the prior movie, but another of the same species. And there’s also a second monster on the island, a prehistoric beast soon named Anguirus.
Kobayashi’s rescued by his buddy and co-worker Tsukioka (Hiroshi Koizumi), who’s in a romance with the boss’s daughter (Setsuko Wakayama). But Godzilla’s soon spotted drawing close to Osaka; a plan to black out the city and draw Godzilla out to sea by dropping flares fails when a group of escaping convicts accidentally start a fire at an oil refinery. Instead, the flares draw Anguirus, and the two giant monsters battle in the city, flattening much of it.
There’s a winner, and it’s not Anguirus. The human cast relocate to the northern island of Hokkaido, to try to keep their fishing fleet in business. But when Godzilla’s spotted yet further north, on an island in the Sea of Okhosk, Kobayashi and Tsukioka team up with the Japanese Air Force in a final battle with the creature, finally burying him beneath an avalanche of ice.
Haruo Nakajima returns in the suit of Godzilla (with Katsumi Tezuka in the suit of Anguirus). Also returning from the previous movie is Takashi Shimura, in a cameo as Doctor Yamane, a paleontologist who here gets the classic scary-movie role of Brainy Guy Who Tells the Audience How the Monster Works. But the plot doesn’t follow too smoothly from the original—a second Godzilla survived from the era of the dinosaurs, and that’s that. Tonally it’s different as well, simple and straightforward.
The first movie had a love story among three of the human characters that didn’t add much to the film or fit into the theme and spectacle. So it is here, though the triangle’s more vestigial and the human characters less vivid. Too much is made of them, and the parts of the movie don’t gel. The sequence where convicts accidentally blow up an oil refinery goes on too long, for example, and the third act in Hokkaido is a change of venue that complicates the plot without adding to it.
Unlike the first movie, you come away from this one wondering about the practicalities of the monsters. By staging a big climax among ice-covered mountains and ultimately freezing Godzilla among a mass of ice cubes, the movie raises the question of whether the big lizard’s cold-blooded; and if so, how’s he dealing with winter? And bringing in a second Godzilla makes you wonder how many other Godzillas are hanging around, and whether they all have atomic breath.
On the other hand, adding another monster for Godzilla to fight is a good idea. The effects aren’t as strong as they were in the first movie, and the choice to use fast-motion for some of the monster shots is a poor one, but the fight of the two strange creatures is a high point. The epic battle recalls not only the original King Kong, but also, oddly, the dinosaur fight in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, with Godzilla standing in for the tyrannosaurus and the spiky quadrupedal Anguirus for the stegosaurus.
And if Hokkaido is an odd narrative choice—you can’t help but think Godzilla’s following the protagonists around Japan—it at least looks nice, a snow-clad setting that sets up the wintry final battle. Similarly, Osaka makes for a visually distinct site of destruction. There are haunting shots of Godzilla following flares out to sea; lights float in the air above the monster, who’s silhouetted against chiaroscuro clouds. It’s particularly effective following imagery of the bustling city of Osaka suddenly going dark upon Godzilla’s arrival.
That image of the city blacking itself out to avoid an attack recalls the anti-war themes of the first movie. But there isn’t the emotional subtext that film had. There are a few references to the idea of nuclear destruction, but no extended scenes of the dead and dying. Instead Godzilla’s attack appears to do primarily architectural damage. Which is to say this is a much more straightforward giant monster movie.
It’s tempting to see the film as suggesting a political allegory in which the two kaiju are the dueling superpowers of the Cold War, with Japan as the unfortunate battleground. But that allegory falls apart, as there’s a decisive victor relatively early in the film. And, as history since has shown, the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force didn’t freeze the victor of the Cold War in a massive avalanche.
Godzilla Raids Again is no more than what it had to be: a sporadically fun giant-monster film. That’s nothing to sneeze at. It’s just not the success of the first Godzilla.