News You Can Bruise for 2003 September 7

I Tivoed this and ended up skipping through a lot of it because it thinks it's a spy movie (this was a common failing of Godzilla movies made in the 1970s). You could do a good spy movie involving Godzilla and Mechagodzilla, but it would be called "The Godzilla Operation" or "Code Name: Mechagodzilla", rather than having a title that implies that the movie is about Godzilla engaged in some sort of dispute or combat vis-a-vis Mechagodzilla. (That reminds me; I need to finish my serialized postmodern Godzilla fanfic so that I can implement my plan of running an installment each Saturday for three Saturdays.)

There is a Godzilla/Mechagodzilla fight in the last twenty minutes, which is pretty good, albeit burdened with fake spurting Godzilla blood. On balance, I think that every other Mechagodzilla movie I've ever seen was better than this one. Heck, I think Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla was better than this movie, if only because Space Godzilla looked neat and had a cool mutant roar, and that movie contained Akira Emoto. For me, if there is to be a monster movie the monsters must have a lot of screen time, and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla came up short on this count.

The other memorable thing about this movie is that the bad guys have a secret hideout and demand that you repeat a codephrase before entering so that they can keep girls and Interpol agents out of their fort. But the only times we see the challenge/response in use, it's being used by people who are infiltrating the hideout, so it's not a very good challenge/response. Maybe they should choose something harder to guess, like "Mecha/Godzilla".