Return of Godzilla (1984) Review- By Michael J. Carlisle

Title: Return of Godzilla
Year: 1984
Director: Koji Hashimoto
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese

After an absence of nine years, Godzilla smashed back onto screens in 1984 in a film simply titled Godzilla (Gojira) in Japan, but marketed as The Return of Godzilla to English-speaking markets. The Return of Godzilla is a reboot. It wipes from continuity all the previous films in the series except Godzilla (1954) and fashions a new continuity: The Heisei Series

Thirty years after the original monster's rampage, a new Godzilla emerges and attacks Japan.

Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka aimed to capture the somber tone of the 1954 original and transplant the Godzilla nuclear metaphor into the 1980s Cold War. This Japan is now squeezed inbetween two oposing nuclear threats; the United States and the Soviet Union. It's a rather ambitious sounding film, but unfortunately fails as both a spectacle and a serious metaphor.

While the Cold War background is intriguing, the human action is bland and no character stands out. The scenes without Godzilla are quite boring and offer no engaging characters. . The Return of Godzilla was Toho’s most expensive science fiction film at the time, and it gave VFX supervisor Teruyoshi Nakano his only hefty budget for a kaiju movie. Some scenes are spectacular (it's always fun to see Godzilla destroy a monster) while others are not so much (he trips...into a volcano?)

The Return of Godzilla didn't make a splash in Japanese markets and wasn't eagerly snapped up in the US; every major film studio turned it down. It's unfortunate that the picture did so poorly, but then again it wasn't very well made. I can't recommend it.