By Joe Gibson
The following is the third
part part of the transcript of a recent video on Plan9Crunch’s YouTube page
that you can watch here: Godzilla's Anime Trilogy:
Attack On Titan On PCP
You can find the first
two parts of this transcript edition through following these links:
Plan
9 Crunch: All About Cult Films: Godzilla’s Anime Trilogy: Attack On Titan On
PCP, Part One
Why I feel the way I do
about this trilogy will become clear with the final installment, what all of
this was building to; officially known as Godzilla The Planet Eater, for this
exercise, let’s call it…
GODZILLA: The Pill Eater
The film opens with
Metphies confessing to the audience that the Exif have been watching humans
since before Godzilla even appeared, far before in fact, before the dawn of
civilization. His conclusion is that religion does not actually work to keep
humans in check, but they seek a leader that can carry out God’s message and
embody the culture of the era. This reframes the trilogy’s events thus far
because it explains why Metphies likes Haruo so much and helped him so much.
Just put a pin in this though; there’s a lot more to say once Haruo finds out.
Godzilla is sleeping once
more after expending so much energy in the last battle. It is 4 minutes into
the movie; let’s play a game and see how long it takes him to wake up this
time. As Martin watches the sleeping Godzilla, he speculates instead of humans’
mistakes birthing Godzilla, maybe humans were the opening act for Godzilla as
the ultimate life form. As Martin is pretty much always right, we must accept
this going forward. The idea kind of makes sense; that is what certain
contingents of people believe about dinosaurs and humans. If we examine this in
the context of the larger mythology of the trilogy, I wonder why the Hoututa
exist then? That is a case of nature recreating humans but faster, stronger,
smarter and more psychically aware, an adaptation that came after Godzilla and
can live in symbiosis with him.
Because of the events of
the previous film, there is a lot of fallout to explore. The Bilusaludo on the
Aratrum see Haruo’s actions as treasonous, while the humans and Exif agree with
the filmmakers about the nanometal. Yuko is in a permanent coma kept alive by
the nanometal, and Adam has seemingly joined Metphies’ religion offscreen due
to the latter’s role in their survival. In fact, Metphies has leveraged Haruo’s
miraculous nanometal resistance as proof he is a hero, and, as Metphies said it
would, that got everybody in line. In other words, a 180-degree character shift
was achieved not through showing us a transformation but with 5 second
foreshadowing via narration at the start of a film. The difficulty with
comparing three movies to a 4 season show is that the show always has more time
to develop themes and characters…except for Pastor Nick, a side character who
is mostly in the shortest season of the show, whose devotion to his religion
gets so much complexity for a bit part. It makes him obstinate but also brave,
a roadblock for the heroes and also helpful in a moment. AOT also has a lot to
say against religion, but it does so a lot more fairly.
Anyway, Haruo is in
anguish over Yuko’s functional death, but Adam’s ramblings snap him back to his
default anger, this time against something Metphies caused (keep this in mind,
it’ll be a surprise tool that can help us later). That scowl persists as he
watches Metphies’ religious ceremony, and Martin takes Haruo aside to explain
the miracle as being the Houtua’s angelic scales as I’ve already mentioned.
Martin calls the religion a cult, and Haruo gets angry but it is difficult to
tell at what. He asks Metphies if they can talk and passes along Martin’s
diagnosis. Metphies explains that he is manipulating the survivors to ready
them for another attack against Godzilla using his God, and for some reason he
is a lot less sly saying it than he usually is, prompting Haruo to scream
asking why their God couldn’t have helped sooner, why people had to die? And
now it is clear that this is about more than just these characters. This is a
rant against organized religion given three yellow heads and beam attacks.
Now okay I do not want a
Plan9Crunch Essay to be for or against religion. The cults we are interested in
here pertain to entertainment culture. I cannot deny that many of the worst
movements and organizations in history have had religion on their lips as they
operated. Nor can I deny that the relevant God or gods have not stepped in at
those times. But I also literally can’t deny that belief in a God is a major
part of 12 step programs because I chose psychoactive drugs as my lens for this
article. And I also think back to Grimm season 5 episode 16 where a Wesen used
his unique ability to give absolution to followers in his religion, convincing
them he was literally taking their sins within himself. Though the episode
interrogated his monetary incentive, the way it resolved showed that without a
doubt what he truly cared about was the people he helped.
These questions of
religion have motivated so much art, and they are natural ones to ask. I just
do not think it is best praxis to relegate the religious characters to mindless
background drones against their prior characterization in the last film of the
trilogy because it makes it so incredibly obvious that Haruo will not choose
them. It’s the nanometal problem all over again but worse. I do not want to
prescribe a specific path and say the story must take it, but if you are
interrogating religion, do it sooner and deeper. Up until this point,
characters like Adam only existed to take potshots at Metphies’ religion. The
commentary becomes so much more potent if he were converted sooner and his
radicalization unfolded before our eyes.
Metphies answers that he
needed Haruo to become so angry his hatred for Godzilla would overcome his
disbelief in their God, that only Haruo was angry enough and proud enough and
sure enough in what humanity ought to be. That is apparently why Metphies selected
Haruo. Wait… I thought, based on the previous scenes I pointed to, that
Metphies molded Haruo this way, that Haruo was always intended to be the hero,
and that’s how this wannabe terrorist made Captain. No, at some unspecified
point, Metphies noticed the anger and pride, a trait Haruo thought no one had
which should logically include himself, and then took an interest in him and
started manipulating him.
The Bilusaludo turn off
the Aratrum’s power, demanding Haruo’s sentencing. In a moment that has been
memed to death, Martin walks in a room to talk to tell Haruo about it, forgets
what he was there to say, goes on a big rant about religion and then remembers
what he was in there to say. Martin pitches that Haruo pull a Trotsky and run
away, and since Martin and Miana (who is in on the plan) are literally the only
people Haruo can trust right now, he has to go along with it.
Conversing with Miana,
Haruo learns that the Houtua philosophy is different from Metphies. They define
winning as surviving and connecting life, with losing as dying. She then
undresses and offers to connect life with Haruo, such a big step from the relatively
chaste kiss last film. I’m more concerned though about the fact that Haruo is
so important that one of, well, actually both, as we’ll find out, of the
powerful priestesses in the Houtua culture instantly want to sleep with Haruo.
Miana claims it is to get to know him better, but both twins winced when they
witnessed Yuko kissing him. This is a weird power fantasy. Now that Metphies’
influence on Haruo is temporarily severed, I can diagnose this as the plot and
writing using Haruo for these delusions of grandeur and invulnerability and not
Metphies making Haruo feel this way. And that is important for the overall PCP
thing because it means that this is not a clever deconstruction of this type of
character, how making someone into a special hero will make them fall in line,
it is just here to be here.
Anyway, thankfully, Haruo
declines her offer…for now. I’ve also seen memes taking the piss out of this
situation, and though this has no value as an appeal about film quality, I
think it is very telling that the only way a large amount of the audience knew
how to interact with this movie is through relentless memes. During Haruo’s
sleep, one of the twins stumbles upon Metphies and confronts him for keeping
secret that he too communicates psychically, while the other one attempts to
remove his spacesuit and sleep with him. I’m still not exactly sure on the
logic that because Miana took off his spacesuit before and Miana struggled to a
little bit ago, that means the currently struggling Miana is actually Maina. In
any case, Haruo sleeps with her. We don’t see the action, but we see the side
of her naked body as she embraces him, and I don’t mean to pearl clutch but you
gotta remember that City On The Edge of Battle was the second Godzilla film
where main characters kissed, and now one of those characters is sleeping with
someone else. This is weird for the franchise. Also, both twins’ subplots
demonstrate some aspect of detachment as a motif. Haruo is so detached from who
he impregnates that he can barely tell her apart from her sister, and Metphies
detaches himself from psychic communication with the Houtua while monologuing
about how detached he is from frank human open expression that he just observes
them for the most part.
Metphies restrains Miana
and threatens to sacrifice her to Ghidorah just as Godzilla opens his eye at
the 32 minute mark. That actually would be a pretty good pace for a standard
Godzilla movie (if the film didn’t show Godzilla waking up again at 43 minutes
in, which is literally halfway if you adjust for the closing credits). At the
same time, Haruo walks in on Metphies preparing a soup for a ritual. After
trying it, while Metphies rambles on about how the angry observer Haruo is the
only thing that makes Godzilla a kaiju and not a giant creature, Haruo peeks in
the pot and finds Miana’s dead body. This is the most memed moment of the
entire film; one really good one has Metphies’ head on Gordon Ramsey’s body.
Okay this was a dream. Haruo was nowhere near Metphies in real life; this is a
memory manipulation from Metphies, and Maina wakes up in terror because she
heard her sister say the word Ghidorah.
(This is not exactly what
I described, but this was the best I could find.)
The soup is real, even if
Miana was not its main ingredient, and it basically becomes the Kool-Aid for
Metphies’ cult. As Metphies tells his followers to embrace God by losing their
individuality, the similarity to the nanometal debacle is probably intentional,
but that was still very recent so it really is not logical that this is
working. Like I get what Gen Urobuchi is trying to say here about religion
making people act against their own self-interests, but this was like between
hours and a week ago that the Bilusaludos were demonized for trying this.
Ghidorah’s shadow emanates from artifacts Metphies and another Exif hold and
massacre the believers. Now, this feels like an allusion to Heaven’s Gate
especially with the alien and liquid components to it, and I think the film
should be a little bit more tactful if this is the form of religious commentary
it wants to provide, but I have my opinions which may become reality and I have
Godzilla The Pill Eater, which is reality.
A singularity opens up,
and one of Ghidorah’s impossibly long necks comes out to destroy the Aratrum.
This version of Ghidorah can warp space and time, and its ties to the Gematron
crystal override the ship’s features. Consequently, their vital signs read as
dead before they actually experience that happening. This causes Ghidorah to
draw nearer to Earth with three singularities nearby for each of the heads.
Haruo and Godzilla both race into action, Haruo to save Miana from Metphies and
Godzilla to face the singularities. I will spare you any reproduction of
Martin’s play by play of the final act of this film; if I were to include it,
we would be here all day. Basically, Ghidorah is not fully real in the world
and so it can attack Godzilla, but he cannot touch it. We are deep into the PCP
use now; reality is bending in on itself, and nothing makes sense anymore.
Metphies starts
monologuing about the flowers of nature and how the prime monster is always the
last and greatest flower, and then Ghidorah, the Golden Demise devours those
fruits. As far as Metphies has told Harou, Ghidorah destroyed the Exif’s
planet, but now he explains that some priests were spared to spread Ghidorah
across the universe. This gets Haruo angry and is coding religion as seeking
destruction. Metphies has put an artifact in his eye that hypnotizes Haruo,
transferring these two into his memories, and this is another area where the
awareness of one’s body and mind, where it starts, how ideology is inseparable
from the human and their tools and their purpose, grand purpose invulnerable
avatars of the fight between Godzilla and Ghidorah all that stuff comes into
play.
And this is also where we
have to give The Planet Eater its flowers. The next few minutes of the movie is
where it beat Attack on Titan to the punch on one of its most beloved plot
points.
This trilogy first went
into production in 2015, and this film was released at the tail end of 2018.
The part of Attack On Titan’s manga where blonde manipulator War Chief Zeke
takes Eren through the latter’s memories in order to convince him of his nihilistic
worldview started to debut in the middle of 2019. The anime trilogy somehow
predicted that the older blonde character would go into the angry one’s
memories and try to convince him of his worldview. It was not without its fair
foreshadowing in AOT; memories were very important to the way Eren and his
Titan functioned, and Zeke clearly needed Eren for something, but it is
uncanny. And I saw this before AOT, so these scenes impressed me on a first
viewing even though I still did not think the reveals were the smoothest.
Haruo resists Metphies’
sermon on the finite nature of the universe with great pain even though he
never once talked about immortality. Then we flash back to Haruo’s memory of
his parents’ death, but now it is Metphies that saves him, not Yuko’s grandfather
Daichi. Metphies hands Haruo his first ration aboard the ship. In the real
world, Metphies cradles Haruo’s body, reenacting La Pieta while trying to
convince Haruo that all of these memories lead to the single truth that Haruo
has just wanted the pain to end, a very suicidal mindset, so let’s go back to
the chart.
Metphies made Haruo
dizzy, which led to loss of balance at which point he gave him hallucinations
of falling into his memories in a state that could be a seizure since Metphies
stabilizes him all with the goal of implanting delusions and suicidal thoughts
so that Haruo will take to the violent behavior of ending the planet. This was
the motherlode of PCP symptoms, and I gotta say I am enjoying myself with this
project.
More than just memories,
Metphies also conjures apparitions of Leland and Yuko and visions of atomic
bomb testing. Metphies also refers to himself as a primate, which I find kind
of weird. Metphies’ manipulation starts to take, despite this gaffe until Maina
and Martin pray to the God Egg Mothra to invade the dream. Before, it was
established that both twins were necessary to amplify the psychic strength
enough to reach a large room full of people, but now Martin can sub in for
Miana to overpower Metphies from an entire Mountain’s height away. It's fine,
don't worry about it. Metphies reveals that he is responsible for blowing up
the Tau-e ship, and this does not immediately enrage Haruo because Metphies has
sufficiently broken him down. Haruo picks up the pendant he lost when his
parents died, and a flashback to something we’ve never seen before restores his
autonomy, the symbolism behind a flower. So Haruo starts getting angry at
Metphies, and that turns the tide of battle, shattering the artifact in Metphies’
eye. Confusingly, this allows Ghidorah to become corporeal, which was only
supposed to happen under the condition of Haruo becoming the anchor, but
whatever. Godzilla immediately beats Ghidorah, and each head vanishes after one
strike each. To pay off that foreshadowing from the start of City on the edge
of battle, Ghidorah’s singularity destroys the Aratrum, and Godzilla destroys
that singularity with an atomic breath from the Earth’s surface.
As Metphies dies, he
tells Haruo that his anger can still manifest Ghidorah if he chooses to, and
Haruo embraces the corpse (this is meant to mirror the last shot of City On The
Edge of Battle) because Metphies still was one of his only friends for years.
With all of the bad guys except for Godzilla defeated, Haruo, Martin and the
other survivors assimilate to Houtua culture, and a montage in a different art
style shows them burying their weapons and rearing children. Eventually, the
humans even adopt the Houtua’s style of clothing except for Haruo, though he is
otherwise clearly happy. (You could use this to claim that Haruo still is not
happy, but that would be forgetting that a major detail of Eren Jaeger’s
clothing style was that he never took off the Shiganshina style shirt even
after fleeing from there, so no, this is a reference to that.) He takes great
joy in seeing spring flowers (the symbol for Haruo’s humanity we introduced at
most 20 script pages ago) and it is Martin finally salvaging a Vulture that
gets Haruo to remember his crippling anger against Godzilla and Metphies’
machinations. So, to prevent Martin from using the nanometal to restart the
process of creating monsters, he makes sure Godzilla will destroy the Vulture
and Yuko’s body, and to prevent himself from summoning Ghidorah, an act coded
as suicide, Haruo puts himself in that Vulture, fulfilling the kamikaze charge
he attempted twice before. In other words, to prevent his own suicide, he
caused it. (Technically he had no way of knowing that it wouldn’t summon
Ghidorah to do that.)
But more to the point,
this time he’s leaving behind a family and culture that depends on him. The
conceit is that he asks Miana if she hates Godzilla, and he starts to feel that
only he feels hate and must die. If he remembered City On The Edge Of Battle,
he would know he is capable of not letting his hate consume him, if he
remembered earlier in this film, he would know he is capable of not letting his
hate draw Ghidorah into the world and consume everything. And he Houtua will
reward this by making Haruo into a God. So, no, this is a terrible ending, but
let’s wrap around these topics. So, Martin restarting industrialization with
the nanometal being destructive per Metphies’ diatribe.
You must consider that if
acts of pollution and war truly are the reason these monsters showed up, it
does not make sense that they started appearing in the late 1990s. But whatever
it’s not like the Exif mentioned timing as being important for their plan, and
it’s not at all like this is an ironic statement.
If the late-stage
civilization of humanity and their polluting technology were bad and created
the monsters, then the humans should not be able to live happily ever after
joining the Houtua with their highly advanced civilization and language
capabilities and their technology that includes the nanometal that was
literally poisoning the land. Well, you might say, okay, but the Earth made
them resistant to nanometal through their scales. Well, they still chose to use
it. Remember that Hedorah, the ultimate environmental evil, was reimagined as a
successful biological weapon harnessed by the humans as one of their last
actions of biological terror against the Earth and its creatures. If I look
back from Houtua to Martin to Houtua to Martin, I do not see a difference as
all he wants to do is use the nanometal as technology. Also, Miana may claim
that the Houtua do not experience hate, but that doesn’t make it something to
demonize. Anger and pride are what makes someone human according to this
trilogy, so Haruo is feeling bad about himself because he is human. Also, the
Houtua can conceptualize enemies, enemies that take each other’s lives in
combat such as what happened between Godzilla and their God Mothra, so the
movie can piss off with that.
Furthermore, one of the
evilest machinations Metphies did was use Haruo’s leadership as a religious
messianic symbol. How are we meant to regard the Houtua making Haruo a God of
Wrath to commemorate him? The film does not explore this because it cannot, but
the myth of Haruo as well as his likely inheritable mental health issues could
lead to a manipulative charismatic leader that once again mobilizes support for
war against Godzilla, but that point is getting away from me.
Haruo killing himself
comes literally out of nowhere in the film, and we are literally in his head to
see his turmoil. The final stretch of Attack on Titan takes us out of Eren’s
head to keep us in suspense about his self-destruction. The Houtua subsequently
immortalize Haruo as a God of Wrath with no runtime left to explore what that
means, while Eren literally becomes a God of Wrath, and his story fully
explores what that insinuates. Those certainly are two approaches to a similar
story, and I think one was better, and the other was on some kind of depressant
drug.
Conclusion
This has been a long
video essay, so I’ll try to keep this conclusion quick. The trilogy is bad, I
think Attack on Titan is good but I have not substantiated that, and I have
drawn comparison between this trilogy’s storytelling and hard drug use.
Attack On Titan is not
the kind of story to show the obvious temptation Haruo is going through and use
every aspect of the story to try and get through his thick head that he
shouldn’t fall for it three times in a row. If this were Attack On Titan and,
again, I mean if the crew had the benefit of knowing how AOT ends and working
backward to see how the Eren archetype inevitably leads there, if that were the
case, then how this trilogy would end is Haruo would use being the avatar of
Ghidorah to overpower the nanometal hive mind in order to become a giant Mecha
King Ghidorah monstrosity to fight Godzilla and the Servum and Mothra and the
Houtua. And then instead of signposting in every way possible that this is
wrong, the art would ask you if it’s wrong and where he went too far and if
there was ever any hope of a different outcome. And that’s the heart of my
critique here. The arc Haruo has in City On the Edge of Battle about choosing
to save his humanity even if it means not killing Godzilla should logically
prevent him from needing to learn that again in The Planet Eater, and seeing
that he was able to overcome both of those and start to be happy with the
Houtua means that he did not need to kill himself at the end. But this
examination of human nature is just his violent and detached suicidal
dissociation that got substantially less fun to talk about once he went through
with it.
And it’s not even paired
with action in a way exemplified by AOT where you can match the rising personal
stakes with the existential ones. This story is slow, more introspective than
it can really afford to be with those moral training wheels rigidly rejecting
the nanometal or Exif religion as even options to rush us into assimilating
with the Houtua. Captain Levi’s speech about still not being sure about what
the right answer is between trusting your team or trusting yourself is a more
human, more sober, and deeper evaluation into the kinds of questions this
trilogy tried to tackle. It is strange that this story is an even darker
scenario for humanity than AOT and yet every major conflict has a clear theme
and anti-theme, a kind of moral simplicity that should leave a story that
intends to demonize religion. This might be a very strange comparison to drop
into the conclusion of this video, but it reminds me of the way that the Barbie
movie showed a toxic matriarchy as an allegory against the patriarchy but still
felt the need to argue that the matriarchy was better because we, as writers,
cannot afford to show a bad scenario and let it speak for itself. There is an
indecision I feel in showing Haruo as an individual in showing these dueling
worldviews as valid alternatives and everything was doomed to either end in the
destruction of the Earth or Haruo killing himself for some reason.
Well, I hope you enjoyed
this transcript edition of my review of Godzilla’s Anime Trilogy. If you have
not watched the video, that is a more unbroken and smooth presentation of these
thoughts, and you can find it here (Godzilla's Anime Trilogy:
Attack On Titan On PCP).
No comments:
Post a Comment