Godzilla And Mothra: The Battle For Earth ['90's High-Tech Version]

Known by a few different titles “Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle For Earth” is a straight on kaiju fest that intentionally recalls the fantastic Showa era original “Godzilla Vs. Mothra (a.k.a. Godzilla Versus the Thing)” but makes a break to make it its own Heisei era original with the introduction to Mothra’s dark doppelganger, Battra. As so often happens in these movies nature herself is woefully out of balance and so mystical forces, of which the monsters are embodiments of, arise to threaten to punish that which has caused the imbalance (us humans of course) and/or to reset the balance. In this case the ginormous Battra caterpillar, whose head is practically bigger than Godzilla in his entirety (!), is the punishing agent and is the yin to Mothra’s yang. Battra is all bad attitude and is a nasty looking monster with lots of prickly angles and spikes especially in its bat-like moth form but this bad attitude is relinquished when it recognizes that Godzilla poses an even greater threat/ imbalance to the natural order and so teams up with Mothra whom Battra had been trying to kill all movie in order to work together to dispose of the big G. Whew! Between the larval and imago stages of both Battra and Mothra and Godzilla just being his big, bad self there are a lot of monsters in this movie that you can shake a stick at…and it’s wonderful! This movie is a festival of gigantic creatures swimming, walking, crawling and flying around battling each other. There are some spectacular monster battles at sea involving Mothra and Godzilla and Battra that are truly some of Toho’s best Heisei era moments. The human drama again follows the same path as the original Godzilla Vs. Mothra except it also adds an early Indiana Jones twist. The human actors anchor the first half of the movie but lose out to all of the monster action in the second half and that’s fine by me. They are likable leads, and even more relatable than the normal scientific swarm and stiff upper lip proclaimers that these movies normally sport so that also makes this movie more enjoyable. This is another great entry in the Godzilla series. 4.5 stars.