Fear of genetic engineering’s been a reliable driver of science fiction plots for decades—longer, if you want to stretch a point and go back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Toho’s 1989 movie Godzilla vs. Biollante isn’t so elevated. But it does a decent job of integrating fears of genetic science into the long-running franchise’s established fears of nuclear horror.
There’d been 15 Godzilla movies from 1954 to 1975, then a nine-year gap until The Return of Godzilla rebooted the series in 1984. The sequel to that film was put on hold after King Kong Lives bombed at the box office. But then when Little Shop of Horrors did well, the Godzilla series re-emerged with one of its oddest installments to date.
It opens right after the previous movie ends, with shots of Return’s climax playing under the opening credits. Then, in the aftermath of the destruction of Tokyo, a running gun battle erupts over the possession of some of Godzilla’s cells. The winners bring the cells to the oil-rich desert kingdom of Saradia, which hopes to use them to create genetically-engineered wheat. A terrorist’s bomb destroys the institute and kills the daughter of the Japanese scientist, Genichiro Shiragami (Koji Takahashi), working on the program.
Five years later, Shiragami’s back in Japan, merging cells from his daughter with a rose in an attempt to recreate her soul, when the Japanese self-defense force recruits him to develop anti-nuclear bacteria as a weapon against Godzilla. Shiragami works with the Godzilla cells, but subplots proliferate as various factions scheme for control of the cells and the bacteria. Shiragami combines the cells with his rose project and creates a monster called Biollante. A terrorist organization reawakens Godzilla (Kenpachiro Satsuma). And there’s a psychic teenager (Megumi Odaka) adding to the confusion.
Say this for the movie: there’s no lack of ambition. The original story, by Shinichiro Kobayashi, was heavily rewritten by director Kazuki Omori. Omori had a medical background and wanted to make a film influenced by genetics. He was also interested in James Bond movies, and the movie has a lot of espionage skullduggery. The gunfight in the opening minutes is a prominent example: scored to an unsubtle soundtrack of guitar solos, it takes place in a ruined subway station illuminated by blue lights filtering through smoke. This is a very 1980s movie.
Much of what follows immediately after the opening is less engaging. We’re introduced to a morass of plots and factions and agencies of the Japanese government, without a sense of what to focus on. Spy-story elements hint at an international scope, but end up with guys in nondescript rooms delivering labored phonetically-learned English dialogue. There’s a lack of tension because nothing builds on itself. A subplot’s introduced, then dropped as another’s trotted out. It’s difficult to be engaged as tones shift: it’s a spy story, except it’s also about a psychic teen, except it’s a science fiction story, except, eventually, it’s a kaiju film.
There are some nice moments in the confusion. In particular, when a classroom of psychic kindergarteners all proudly show off crayon drawings they’ve made of their ominous dreams, and all of the drawings are of Godzilla. It’s a lovely bit of foreshadowing that belongs in a much better movie.
Despite Omori’s Bond fixation, the kaiju bits are where the movie comes alive, thanks to special effects direction from Koichi Kawakita. Godzilla’s longtime foes in the Japanese armed forces have some new tricks, and the evolving Biollante makes for an interesting visual contrast to Godzilla. The climactic battle has some distinctive visual moments—not moments that look real, but moments that have patterns of light and color, and that engages you because they don’t look like anything other than a Godzilla movie.
Unsurprisingly, there’s no subtext in this film, for all the many strands of plot. Acting and dialogue do the business of telling the story, and that’s it. There’s a non-specific environmentalism that feels as 1980s as the wealthy baddies, though it does work well with the franchise’s core theme of nuclear war and human mismanagement of technology.
But the movie’s core problem is that it mismanages Godzilla. It’s not that he doesn’t get screen time, but that he doesn’t have much of an interest in Biollante or the other subplots. Godzilla’s driven by hunger, and that’s it. He simply wants to feed on the radiation of nuclear power plants; Biollante’s a distraction for him. So is everything else.
It’s possible to build a movie around an animal protagonist, but the work isn’t done here. Godzilla doesn’t feel like a character, doesn’t have an arc, and ends the film arbitrarily wandering out to sea much like he seems to arbitrarily wander into the story in the first place. The end overall is an especially oddly-paced sequence in which the subplots get paid off one by one, along with an oddly Disneyesque image of Shiragami’s daughter’s soul ascending to the skies. It gets the job done, but is structurally unengaging, diffusing any tension the climax has rather than concentrating it.
The movie didn’t do especially well at the box office, though retrospective fan opinion is positive, and the movie has topped at least one poll of favorite Godzilla movies. In 1989, Toho’s takeaway was the movie tried too many new things. They’d go on to make more sequels, but with lower budgets, and with familiar faces from the earlier films brought back. Whether the choice of remedy was appropriate or not, it’s hard to say they were entirely wrong.