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Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki), an airplane pilot working for Yamaji's (Yukio
Kasama) fishery who guides the fishing boats to large tuna swarms, experiences
a technical fault in his airplane & has to water his plane next to an
uninhabited island. There he & Tsukioka (Hiroshi Koizumi), who has come to
rescue him, to their great shock see the giant dinosaur-monster Godzilla - who
was thought dead - fight a giant hedgehog-like monster Anguirus.
Fleeing in terror they reach safe land safely, however, when they report
their findings to the authorities, they can do little to relieve our heroes of
their fears ... since leading scientist Doctor Yamane (Takashi Shimura) is
convinced there is no weapon that can harm let alone kill Godzilla, & the
only chance humanity has against the monster is - since Godzilla is attracted
by light - to completely darken the cities everytime the monster's approaching,
& shoot lightballs off into a different direction to lure Godzilla away ...
Soon Godzilla approaches Osaka - where Kobayashi & Tsukioka live -,
& the tactic to lure the monster away with lighballs seems to work fine ...
until our heroes get involved in a carchase, with them pursuing 3 escaped
convicts, at the end of which the convicts truck crashes into an oil refinery,
which sets the whole refinery aflame.
Godzilla, spotting the fire, thinks this to be too nice an invitation to
miss out on & soon lays waste to Osaka's harbour area ... when Anguisus
arrives too, & the 2 fight it out once & for all, with the whole city
as battleground & in the end Anguirus losing both the fight & his life
... Godzilla retreats - for the time being.
With the Osaka branche of the fisbhing company they work for literally laid
to waste, Kobayashi, Tsukiko & Tsukiko's fiancée move to Hokkaido to
resume working, where the men also meet their old friends for mthe air force.
Of course, soon Godzilla is sighted near Hokkaido, & all the air force
pilots fly off on a search for the monster, but it is of course Tsukiko who
finds Godzilla swimming through the sea, & when his plane runs out of gas,
Kobayashi takes over & witnesses Godzilla leaving the water, taking a hike
on a snowy island full of mountains. & while he, with some fancy flying
maneuvres tries to keep the monster on the island, waiting for the army to
arrive, Hidemi - Tsukiko's fiancée - finds out Kobayashi is in love with her
too ... but it's too late for Kobayashi, who, when playing Godzilla's lure is
killed, crashing into a mountain ... but the avalanche his crashing lane is
causing gives the army the uidea to bury the monster under avalanches &
avalanches of snow - so Kobayashi's death was not in vain.
Despite being far less childish than Godzilla-movies got in
the 1960's, this first sequel to Godzilla
from 1954 is of course no equal to the original on a pure quality level, it has
pretty much all the qualities that hastily produced sequels to a surprise
successes usually have: a very derivative, formulaic story, pedestrian
storytelling, & special effctw that are on one hand only more of the same,
on the other hand inferior to the original (partly due to the fact that the
[relative] originality is gone).
The film taken by itself suffers too much from a dull human-interest-story
abiout the love triangle between the three main characters, but this subplot,
it seems, is not really thought through from the beginning, & further more
it's only very loosely (& very late in the film) tied in with the
main-(monster-)plot, which makes the movie, despite some massive monster
wrestling, a rather boring affair.
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