The Return Of Godzilla

SOS Barbican 
Kaiju Attack

The Return Of Godzilla
aka Gojira
aka Godzilla 85 (US recut)
Directed by Kôji Hashimoto 
Japan 2024
Toho
Screened at Barbican Outdoor Cinema 
Saturday 23rd August 2025

Last year, during the middle of the August Bank Holiday FrightFest, I left them all to it one night and slipped out to see Godzilla VS Hedora (aka Godzilla VS The Smog Monster) as part of Barbican’s outdoor cinema event. I loved it (of course, it’s probably my favourite Godzilla movie) but I didn’t review the evening because I’d already reviewed the Criterion edition of the film here.

And I had such a good time with it that, this year, I did exactly the same thing. Slipping away from FrightFest after a screening of Self Help (reviewed here) I made my way to the Barbican for a screening of the 1984 movie, billed as The Return Of Godzilla (among many titles) and sat sipping my cider, waiting for the film to start on the big, inflatable screen as the stars came out... and just soaked up the atmosphere. 

Now there were two interesting things I noticed as things started up properly. First, there was a recorded introduction by a man currently writing another new tome about The Big G and he made the point... and I didn’t realise this myself... that this was the actual UK premiere of the original Japanese version of the film. Now, I’m sure I saw an uncut Japanese version televised over here but, I may be wrong. Apparently all the home release versions are the butchered US cuts (with the return of Raymond Burr, reprising his role from the butchered US recut of the original 1954 movie) so, yeah. That makes more sense in hindsight because, although it can only be thirty years since I last watched this... I honestly didn’t remember any of it, apart from some of the music (I’ll get to that soon). 

The other thing I discovered, when the film began to roll, was that the western distributors of this print were Janus Films... which is actually Criterion, for all intents and purposes. So I’m really hoping this is a test screening for a full on Blu Ray box set from that company giving us a complete second wave at some point soon (especially since I have some gaps in that second wave... I haven’t seen them all like I have the first and third waves). So, yeah, fingers crossed. It was a packed screening, so that’s promising.

The film is a fairly standard, for all intents and purposes, retelling of the 1954 original but by way of a direct sequel to that film. And this is where it loses me a little because the producers decided to ignore all of the original sequels and make this one a direct follow up with the same Godzilla (Gojira). Except... wait a minute... in the original film the first Godzilla is definitely wiped out by the Oxygen Destroyer and turned into a skeleton, if memory serves. The following movies, starting with Godzilla Raids Again (aka Gigantis The Fire Monster, which is reviewed here) started with a second creature christened Godzilla... and it was that version of the creature which carried on into all the other sequels up to that point. But if that’s the case, with the creature being ‘reawoken’ here... how, if its a direct sequel to the first movie, could that possibly be? It’s just a broken down old skeleton or, I think probably less than that even (it might have dissolved completely, again, if memory serves?). So, yeah, the premise of this movie makes absolutely no sense, I’m afraid to say. 

The film was offered to original Godzilla veteran Ishirô Honda but he declined after remembering how the character had been lionised and dumbed down in the decades following the first film. Instead of helming this, he elected to help his friend Akira Kurosawa film Ran instead, although he did suggest the director for this project, who was one of his assistant directors working on the original series of Godzilla films. 

 Similarly, composer Akira Ifukube also turned the project down and so this is the only film in this second Hesiei Era (even though it was still technically made in the Showa Era, go figure) in which versions of Ifukube’s scores are not heard. Instead, composer Reijirô Koroku provides a score which, I’ll be honest, is a bit hit and miss for me. I could do without the occasional decline into cheesy pop synths but, again, some of the score is very good. Although the music, when scenes of the Super X weapon coming out to the rescue like something out of Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds, seems very English. In fact, it sounds pretty much like one of the famous marches Ron Goodwin would write for a World War II movie in the UK so, yeah, it feels like a throwback in those scenes too, even for a movie released in 1984. 

Another interesting point though... in Tokyo in 1954, skyscrapers were a lot shorter than they are nowadays and so the original 50ft sized Godzilla would certainly be dwarfed by his surroundings now. So this time they made the creature 80ft tall, in order that he could once again tower above the urban environment. This was probably a smart movie on the part of the movie’s producers, I would say.

And that’s me done with The Return Of Godzilla, I think. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I remembered liking it 30 years ago but the atmosphere and the audience response to it at the Barbican more than made up for any problems with the movie... those being a lot of dull, board meeting scenes which go on for way too long (much like the ones in the very boring Shin Godzilla, reviewed here) and not nearly enough of the Godzilla action you want to see. So, not my favourite of the Hesei era by a long shot but, still, an interesting watch to say the least. I hope Barbican do another outdoor Godzilla movie next year too. 

Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters

Ghidorah With Delight

Godzilla - The Official
Guide To The King
Of The Monsters
by Graham Skipper
Welbeck Books
ISBN: 9781787398993

Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters is a new book published towards the end of 2022, written by Graham Skipper and completely authorised by Toho Studios, who have allowed the publishing company unlimited access to loads of never before seen photos from the films and behind the scenes shots (more on those photos later). And, it’s a book I’m very happy to have but, it has to be said, I also had some small issues with it too. So yeah, it’s good and bad... let’s get to it.

The tome is split into six main sections, book ended by an Introduction and a Closing section thusly... The Showa Era, The Heisei Era, The Millennium Era, The Reiwa Era, The American Era and Godzilla In Other Media. And, as you would imagine, the first five of those are split into mini chapters, each one covering one of the films from their particular era. Each main section is accompanied by a nice illustration but, it seems for every positive thing I have to say to about this book (which is ultimately a nice thing to have), there’s a yang to the yin with something negative about that particular aspect.

Okay, so the first thing I will bring up is the design. It looks fantastic and the front cover of the hardback depicting The Big G himself in silhouette, is textured as rubbery scales. Like someone has gone mad with a spot varnish effect to the point where it’s built up in loads of lumps on the cover... it looks and, yeah, feels fantastic. You could definitely have sex with this book if you so desired (I won’t be kink shaming here). And the design positives continue inside where each film is given a huge title information strip taking up between a quarter and a third of the page, with info like the year, the director, some cast members etc presented as a little block. But the negative of this is, because the title sections take up so much space on the page, the regular body copy text is both tiny (maybe 8pt or even less) and on a blue tinted background, which further makes it harder to read. So yeah, it’s a case of cutting down on the legibility and readability of the thing in favour of saving space (and therefore money) it seems to me.

Positive thing number two is that it’s profusely illustrated with, as claimed, lots of shots which will be new to fans of this particular kaiju. But that’s also its downfall because, almost all of the hundreds of photos included are... you guessed it... just shots of Godzilla and various other monsters such as Mothra, Mechagidzilla, King Ghidora and the like. Which can get pretty dull. I’d much rather see a picture of the title credits singer and the psychedelic club dancers from Godzilla VS Hedorah, for example, than endless shots of giant monster destruction. So, yeah, the novelty of the pictures does wear thin after a while. Even allowing for the fact that there’s a picture of Godzooky on one page (and if you know who that is... watch out mate, you’re showing your age).

Okay, positive thing number three is it covers things I didn’t expect it to. Such as the fact that the Hedorah suit actor got appendicitis while shooting and doctors had to come and operate on him in the studio, while he was still wearing the Hedorah costume, in order to save his life. They cover the translation issues about the title creature's name... giving a pretty convincing reason for the translation change from Gojira to Godzilla, which is apparently used with Toho’s blessing. And they’ve even got a section on Luigi Cozzi’s re-tinted, ‘cut and paste with new footage’ Italian release, affectionately known as Cozilla (a film I’d not even heard of until I purchased a bootleg of it last year... yeah, I’ll watch it and review it eventually people). The downside is, of course, that for all the things it includes, it misses out tenfold, loads of other facts that could have been put in here. And it even leaves out things like, in the section dedicated to the comics... well, probably the most famous comic book incarnation of them all. I mean, how do you write a section on the comic book versions and not include Marvel’s late 1970s series of Godzilla - King Of The Monsters comic.

Similarly, if you have a section on American film appearances but fail to mention that a drawing of the character appears in Kong - Skull Island, which is actually the second entry in the interconnected US Monserverse films based on Godzilla and his kaiju brethren, then I just don’t know what to say. So, yeah, that’s a bit short sighted, especially when the third and fourth films in the series follow on from the Kong movie.

Two more things. One, the writer uses the term “an horrific sight” at one point. Nope, totally wrong and I hate it when ‘toffs’ use this kind of incorrect language. It’s “a horrific sight” with a hard H, thank you very much. What planet do these people come from? Also... I can only hope the writer has updated some of the Wikipedia entries for some of the subjects covered there himself... because I certainly don’t want to mention the term plagiarism here, for sure. Which I’m not.

And I don’t think I have much more to say about this one. Overall I enjoyed Godzilla - The Official Guide To The King Of The Monsters and, certainly I wish I’d had a copy of this to pore over when I was first re-discovering the character many decades ago. It’s a perfect thing for beginners to the world of Godzilla for sure and, even jaded old fans like myself should get something out of it. That being said, it’s not the essential guide it makes itself out to be and, I think a proper book of well over a thousand pages with each of the many films given at least one 40 page chapter of their own, would have been more welcome (and I’m hoping that happens sometime, to be sure). But, yeah, it’s a nice looking beast and many people should have some fun with it, I think.