Ishiro Honda led a varied and sometimes dark life by the time he made Destroy All Monsters, the ninth Godzilla film, in 1968. Born in a small village in 1911 to a Buddhist monk, Honda entered the film industry only to have his career almost derailed by compulsory military service. After an attempted coup against the government by Honda’s commanding officer was suppressed, Honda and other officers in his unit, who’d had nothing to do with the plan, were sent to occupied China.
There, Honda was assigned to help manage a “comfort station,” in which women and girls were forced into sexual slavery. Unsurprisingly, Honda was affected by the war crimes he witnessed and was made to participate in. He’d write an article in 1966 for a film magazine about his time at the comfort station, discussing some of the atrocities he saw and his own actions in a way that was, for the time and place, startlingly open.
Returning to movies after Japan’s defeat, Honda made documentaries and then some popular features before coming out with the greatest success of his career, 1954’s Godzilla. His horror and disgust at war is clear in that film. But later years saw a series of sequels diminish the nightmare power of the giant radioactive lizard. As ordained by Toho producers, Honda’s Godzilla was repurposed as a grumpy kid’s-film antihero.
After scheduling conflicts kept Honda from working on two Godzilla sequels, he returned to his most famous creation in 1968, with Destroy All Monsters. He wrote the script with frequent collaborator Takeshi Shimura, new to the Godzilla franchise but an old hand at writing giant-monster films for Honda like Rodan and The War of the Gargantuas.
Destroy All Monsters is one of the great titles in cinema history, and the film’s solid enough. It’s an inventive kaiju movie that brings together a lot of giant monsters, throws in some aliens, and creates a few exciting moments. It’s a spectacular adventure for children with lots of fun action and imagination.
At his best, though, Honda brings depth and humanism to his fantasy movies. Destroy All Monsters is the first Godzilla film he made after his article about his time in a comfort station was published, and while you wouldn’t expect anything specific about that experience to turn up in a giant-monster movie, it’s still tempting to look here for hints of self-reflection. If Godzilla started as a symbol of nuclear war, was Honda, however unconsciously, still telling stories about war with later kaiju movies like this one?
The plot’s simple. In the mysterious future of the 1990s, humanity has managed to pen up the various giant monsters they’ve encountered in Monsterland, using technology to keep the monsters from straying. Because this is the future, there’s also a moon base, and a snazzy rocket ship.
The ship comes in handy when things start going wrong on Monsterland. Evil aliens use mind-control technology to take over the kaiju, and also some of the scientists studying them. Good-guy humans work out what’s happening, fight the aliens in space and on earth, and free the monsters. The climax is a big fight at the aliens’ hidden base beneath Mount Fuji.
The continuity’s strange; Minilla, the (adopted) son of Godzilla, is still a child 30 years in the future. Admittedly, we don’t know what the maturation rate of a kaiju is. In any event there’s a kind of timelessness to the movie. It doesn’t care about creating a credible future, and the costumes and architecture and cars and so on look like what you’d expect for 1968. The point of setting it in the future is so you can have rockets and moon bases, and in that sense the movie’s a little dreamlike.
And then there’s the monsters. The film pulls in 11 different kaiju from across the Tohoverse, incorporating creatures that have co-starred with Godzilla before and a few that haven’t. Add them to the nominally futuristic setting, and there’s an extravagance, a go-for-broke quality that almost obscures the slenderness of the story. The plot’s simple and familiar—we’ve seen Godzilla fight evil mind-controlling aliens before, notably in Honda’s 1965 Invasion of Astro-Monster.
Is there something to this theme that Honda wanted to explore? Maybe, or maybe it’s something that came out during the creative process without his intending it; or maybe it’s a coincidence that Honda made two Godzilla movies consecutively but three years apart with the same basic plot point. It’s tempting to see a symbolic theme about the way in which evil hierarchies use the monstrous parts of ourselves; tempting to see these movies arguing that freedom is the way to defeat militarism and tyranny.
Perhaps the theme of the kaiju forced to fight echoes Honda’s experience of conscription. Perhaps not. The original idea for the film was a monster-oriented retelling of the story of the 47 ronin, samurai who gathered together to destroy the political opponent of their dead former master. How much the ideas of that story resonate with Honda’s war experience, ordered by the Japanese hierarchy to perform morally repugnant actions in the name of national order, are beyond my ability to puzzle out.
You never want to flatten a rousing adventure into mere allegory. But when a thrilling kid’s-adventure movie works, you often get the feeling there’s something else going on far below the surface. Maybe that’s the case here. But then, maybe a giant lizard is just a giant lizard.
