A Smoggy Day in Kaiju Town

What a mess we've made of our planet. And who's going to clean it up? Godzilla! At least when the mess manifests as a giant monster as it does in 1971's Godzilla vs. Hedorah (ゴジラ対ヘドラ). Filled with strange jumps in the narrative and improbably lucky guesses from the humans that undercut the tension, this is still an extraordinarily stylish Godzilla movie with plenty of points of interest.

A beautiful singer (Keiko Mari) takes us through the opening credits with a groovy song in which she implores the fates to return our green forests and blue seas.

She reappears in a club scene later where a young man inexplicably hallucinates fish heads on her and the crowd.

The message about pollution is heavy handed, as it usually is, but the movie succeeds best when it's just plain weird. The villain, Hedorah, is actually an alien whom the scientist protagonist somehow deduces was created by a nuclear reaction before coming to earth and thriving on industrial waste. The old symbol of nuclear menace, meanwhile, Godzilla, is a hero at this point in the film series, sharing telepathic communications with the child protagonist (Hiroyuki Kawase).

In one scene, the kid watches his father, the scientist (Akira Yamauchi), go scuba diving to investigate the strange giant tadpoles that have been turning up. We see the man encounter Hedorah underwater and there's a cut to the kid vainly calling out for him on shore. And I thought, "Oh, the poor kid's lost his dad." But then there's a jump cut to the man in bed, back at home, with his son by his side, and there's a calm conversation about his injury. It feels odd, we definitely should have seen the man finally pulling himself out of the water. But half his face is disfigured, a little moment of horror that helps shore up emotional impact for the scene.

The movie also includes animated segments and altogether the production design is pretty good. The fight scenes are a little silly by this point, especially since Godzilla at this point had picked up a habit of wiping his mouth and bobbing and weaving like a boxer.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah is available on The Criterion Channel. Yeah, that's right.