Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 55

Report from Cleveland ConCoction

It’s near the end of day 2 of ConCoction, and I’m taking advantage of some downtime in my hotel room to post this. The drive up yesterday went okay, except for a few minutes’ slowdown due to construction near Columbus. It only took about two hours longer than Google Maps’ theoretical drive time, what with the stops I made for gas, rest, and lunch. So I made it here in time for the opening ceremonies, and in time to see my Uncle Clarence, who drove in from Detroit. That’s two conventions in a row where I’ve had a relative visit. Anyway, his stay was fairly brief, but he’s a man of few words, and I’ll see him again tomorrow when I go to visit Aunt Shirley and Uncle Harry in Detroit for the last time (they’re moving).

The con staff got me all set up in Author’s Alley, and checked the books I brought for sale into their system so they could sell them for me when I’m away, a nice service. But I kept a stock of Only Superhuman hardcovers on hand to sell myself, and I’ve sold a decent number of copies today. I’m benefitting from the use of one of those credit card swiper attachments for smartphones, which I got for this trip, since on past occasions I’ve missed out on a few sales due to not being able to take credit cards.

The giveaway copies of the Rise of the Federation books showed up from Pocket as well, including Live by the Code, which I got to see for the first time in person:

Sorry, not a great shot. I’m not accustomed to taking “selfies.”

I was also given a gift basket by the con staff, including a box of specialty chocolates like these:

Yes, that is a chocolate Serenity.

(And thanks to my new laptop, I’m able to upload these direct from my phone through the USB cable. Apparently this one has the right connection software built in, whereas I could never get it to work on my old laptop. On the other hand, though, I discovered today that the right arrow key on my laptop keyboard has come loose.)

I’ve also gotten to meet a couple of people with whom I have common professional ties — Larry Nemecek, who’s a big name in Star Trek nonfiction, and scientist/author Geoffrey A. Landis, who got his start as a professional writer in Analog the same as me, though he’s done considerably more since. So that’s been cool.

I’ve had a couple of panels that went pretty well. There was a panel at 11 PM last night on SF/fantasy heroines, and though there were barely more audience members than panelists, we had a good, lively discussion about writing women effectively, and then I and a few other panelists and guests just hung around the room chatting until nearly 1 AM. (It’s not like I was gonna get any sleep on my first night in a hotel anyway.) This morning we had an author showcase, and I had been planning on reading the first scene of Live by the Code, but I hadn’t found time to rehearse and I was afraid it’d be too long, plus the audience seemed more interested in Only Superhuman, so I fell back on performing a scene from that which I’ve done before, and which I had fun doing again, though I got so enthusiastic that I gave myself a headache. Then there was a panel on creating characters that I somehow ended up assigned to moderate without realizing it, and though I didn’t have many character-creation anecdotes to offer, the rest of the group made it a pretty lively discussion.

I’ve got another panel coming up shortly, then one more tomorrow morning. More to follow soon, I hope.

Blurbs out for TIME LOCK and THE FACE OF THE UNKNOWN

I just found out from The Trek Collective that the blurbs for my next two Star Trek projects but one, Department of Temporal Investigations: Time Lock and TOS: The Face of the Unknown, have been released online.

First, Time Lock, an e-novella coming September 5:

The dedicated agents of the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations have their work cut out for them protecting the course of history from the dangers of time travel. But the galaxy is littered with artifacts that, in the wrong hands, could threaten reality. One of the DTI’s most crucial jobs is to track down these objects and lock them safely away in the Federation’s most secret and secure facility. As it happens, Agent Gariff Lucsly and his supervisor, DTI director Laarin Andos, are charged with handling a mysterious space-time portal device discovered by Starfleet. But this device turns out to be a Trojan horse, linking to a pocket dimension and a dangerous group of raiders determined to steal some of the most powerful temporal artifacts ever known…

Yes, it’s my second DTI novella in a row with a focus on the Eridian Vault, but there’s a method to my madness. This time, for one thing, the Vault is more central to the story. And this is a rather different tale from its predecessor The Collectors, and indeed from any Star Trek time-travel story I can think of. (And don’t worry — Dulmur and other familiar characters will play key roles despite not being mentioned in the blurb.)

Next, The Face of the Unknown, a mass-market paperback novel coming December 27:

Investigating a series of violent raids by a mysterious predatory species, Captain James T. Kirk discovers that these events share a startling connection with the First Federation, a friendly but secretive civilization contacted early in the USS Enterprise’s five-year mission. Traveling to the First Federation in search of answers, the Enterprise suddenly comes under attack from these strange marauders. Seeking refuge, the starship finds its way to the true home of the First Federation, an astonishing collection of worlds hidden from the galaxy beyond. The inhabitants of this isolated realm are wary of outsiders, and some accuse Kirk and his crew for bringing the wrath of their ancient enemy down upon them. When an attempt to stave off disaster goes tragically wrong, Kirk is held fully accountable, and Commander Spock learns there are even deeper forces that threaten this civilization. If Kirk and Spock cannot convince the First Federation’s leaders to overcome their fears, the resulting catastrophe could doom them all!

So now it can be told. “The definitive First Federation novel” has been on my dream-projects list for a long time now. I was going to do one as a Titan novel some years ago, but I got sidetracked onto a different project and then a change of editors led to the First Federation book falling through the cracks. The Face of the Unknown incorporates a number of ideas from that abortive project, though it’s 5-year-mission TOS. To be precise, it’s in between the end of the original series and the start of the animated series. It’s my first full novel set in the 5-year mission, although I’ve visited it previously in one novelette (“As Others See Us” in the Constellations anthology) and in the flashbacks in the first half of DTI: Forgotten History.

The title is from Kirk’s line to Bailey upon inviting him to beam over to Balok’s pilot vessel — “The face of the unknown. I think I owe you a look at it.” I wasn’t sure about the title at first — it was just the only “Corbomite Maneuver” quote I could find that was even remotely suitable as a title — but in the course of writing the book, I came to feel that it was a good fit for the story after all. (And the only other possibility that I considered was First Principles, which was kind of weak.)

LIVE BY THE CODE to debut at Cleveland ConCoction!

We’re just under two weeks out from the Cleveland ConCoction convention at the Cleveland Sheraton Airport Hotel, at which I’ll be the author Guest of Honor, a first for me. And on the subject of firsts, I’m pleased to announce that my new Star Trek novel will be making its debut a few weeks early at the convention.

Simon & Schuster has agreed to provide a limited number of copies of Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code (book 4 in the series), which I will sign and give away on a first come, first served basis. The book doesn’t officially go on sale until March 29, but the folks at S&S were kind enough to work with me and the convention staff to make this happen. There will also be a larger number of giveaway copies of books 2 & 3, Tower of Babel and Uncertain Logic, though unfortunately S&S doesn’t currently have book 1 in stock.

The plan is to split the supply into three lots so that there will be giveaway books available on all three days of the convention. But they’ll probably go pretty quickly, so if you plan to attend, I suggest you try to come early. I’ll endeavor (pun intended) to keep folks posted about my schedule.

While these three ROTF volumes will be given away, I also plan to have various books from my own reserves which will be for sale, including some older Trek novels, but mostly featuring hardcover copies of my original novel Only Superhuman. The last time I was at a comics-oriented convention, I was able to move a fair number of copies of OS, so I’m hoping the same will be true this time.

I’ll also be on several panels over the course of the convention. The schedule can be found here. My own scheduled appearances include:

FRIDAY, MARCH 11

5 PM, Orion Ballroom: Opening Ceremonies
11 PM, Lyra Room: “My Favorite Heroines”: Panel about female protagonists in SF/fantasy.

SATURDAY, MARCH 12

11 AM, Lyra Room: Author Showcase: Includes Q&A and a reading from one of my books (which means I’d better pick out a scene to read!)
Noon, Authors’ Alley: Autograph session following up the Showcase.
3 PM, Pegasus Room: “Strange Stories About Coming Up with Characters”: Speaks for itself, I guess.
8 PM, Lyra Room: “Shaping the Short Story”

SUNDAY, MARCH 13

11 AM, Lyra Room: “Best Worlds in Sci-Fi”: Talking about the SF universes we love.
2 PM, Orion Ballroom: Closing Ceremonies

I’ll also be available at my Guest of Honor table (ooh, I like saying that) in Authors’ Alley at various times throughout the weekend. I gather the other Guests of Honor (actors, musicians, gamers, cosplayers, etc.) will be gathered in their own area, but I feel that being with the other author guests will be a better fit, since that’s where the book fans will presumably be.

For more Pocket Books news, you can follow their Facebook fan page, and their Twitter address is @Pocket_Books.

Ars Technica interviewed me on STAR TREK time travel

Ars Technica, a science and technology news site that also covers SF and media, has posted a lengthy, in-depth article by Xaq Rzetelny exploring the science of time travel in Star Trek and discussing my attempts to reconcile and rationalize it in my Department of Temporal Investigations books. I was interviewed for the article, and there are some quotes from me toward the end — and even a quote from an actual physicist reacting to my quotes. You can read the whole piece here:

Trek at 50: The quest for a unifying theory of time travel in Star Trek

Thoughts on Toho’s DOGORA and KING KONG ESCAPES (spoilers)

Here are a couple of standalone kaiju films I’ve managed to track down over the past year or so, bracketing the Frankenstein duology I covered in my previous post. I’d been saving these until I could add one or two more films to the post, but the Frankenstein reviews turned out long enough that it made more sense to post them in pairs.

—

Dogora the Space Monster (Uchuu Daikaiju Dogora) was the film Ishiro Honda made in 1964 between the classic Mothra vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster — just before the era when Godzilla films started to grow more kid-oriented and whimsical, but also just a year before the dark and moody Frankenstein Conquers the World. Dogora tends toward the latter route, mostly striking a pretty serious tone, but it’s kind of an odd one too.

Nominally, Dogora is about the mysterious attacks of a mutated amoeba-like monster living in Earth orbit, able to suck things up into the sky with antigravity powers. But mostly it’s a crime caper about international diamond thieves. One such gang (the film’s featured villains) finds a diamond heist interrupted by something that levitates them, then absconds with the diamonds after they flee. Police inspector Komai (Yosuke Natsuki) investigates the home of crystallographer Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura), where Komai gets into a fight with American Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham, who would later play the Seatopian king in Godzilla vs. Megalon), himself a suspected jewel thief. The film mostly follows the interplay of Komai, Jackson, and the gang as they compete for various diamond hauls, occasionally finding themselves interrupted as Dogora comes down from space to suck up coal and diamonds as its energy source. Munakata’s assistant, who’s also Komai’s love interest, conveniently has a brother in the space agency, so they end up advising the military on Dogora, with Komai occasionally touching base with them in between clashing with Jackson and the gang. About a third of the way in, Jackson reveals that he’s actually an international insurance investigator, a “diamond G-man” as he puts it, although he continues to behave in a suspicious manner and seems to be playing Komai as much as he’s playing the thieves. So Komai follows him when he follows the gang to Kyushu (Japan’s southernmost island), which naturally comes under attack by Dogora.

Eventually the military gets lucky when Munakata learns that a swarm of wasps was able to hurt Dogora, turning parts of it into crystal that rain down on the city. So they concoct a huge batch of wasp venom to use as a chemical weapon in Dogora’s next attack. But the cops and crooks have their own concerns. The gangsters’ moll, the sultry, sexy Hamako (Akiko Wakabayashi, later to appear in the Bond film You Only Live Twice), absconds with the diamonds that Jackson had in a safe-deposit box, leading the gang to hunt her down for double-crossing them, and Komai and Jackson (after barely escaping a dynamite deathtrap) chase the gangsters down in turn — with the overhead battle with Dogora interrupting their gunfight and having a rather decisive, err, impact on its outcome.

Structurally, this is a weird movie. It’s like Honda wanted to do a straight-up crime caper, but was obligated to put in a monster because that’s what people expected from him. The Dogora side of the story, despite providing the title, is very much secondary to the cops-and-robbers plot, largely going on in the background as the crime drama unfolds. But it provides an interesting look at the psychology of the people who live in the universe of Toho’s monster movies. (The characters do talk about monsters without much disbelief when they first begin to realize that one is responsible for all the diamond “thefts” around the world, implying that the film is in the same universe as the other kaiju films.) After a decade dealing with monsters of all sorts, they’ve grown blase about it; they just leave the monster-fighting to the military and the scientists while they go about their own affairs. It’s interesting to see a kaiju movie that’s mainly about the people who aren’t involved in fighting the kaiju, who don’t even particularly care about it except when it gets in the way of their own goals.

Although, really, you’d think they would care more. Knowing that there’s a giant space amoeba-squid with the power to suck diamonds up into the sky, these people would logically try to lay low and avoid anything to do with diamonds until the problem had been resolved. Maybe the crooks were just too greedy to think straight, and the heroes too ploddingly fixated on their duties to see the bigger picture. Even though Komai was in contact with the people who were dealing with Dogora.

Still, it’s also a pretty fresh and impressively made kaiju movie, with some really creative visual effects from Eiji Tsuburaya’s team. Dogora is a nifty departure from all the stuntmen in rubber lizard suits stomping down buildings. It’s eerie and alien, frequently unseen — which was probably due to budget limitations, given the rather more elaborate monster attack scenes shown in the production art on the DVD, but works well at creating a sense of mystery. The visuals of mounds of coal and various structures being sucked skyward by antigravity are a fresh and novel approach to kaiju destruction scenes, and well-made (generally relying on reverse filming). There’s also some rather beautiful use of cloud tank effects, dyes swirling in water with the Dogora puppet waving its tentacles within the cloud. There are also some shots of explosions going off inside the cloud that remind me of some of the Mutara Nebula shots from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I believe cloud tank effects were pretty innovative for 1964, and not just in Japan. This is impressive work, although some of the action is confusing in the last third of the movie.

Unusually for an American actor in a kaiju film, Robert Dunham was fluent in Japanese (he was a former U.S. Marine who’d been living in Japan since he served there years earlier), and thus he speaks Japanese in his own undubbed voice throughout, except once or twice when Jackson lapses into English briefly in moments of surprise or emotion. He even pronounces “New York” and other Western city names the Japanese way. Oddly, though, the other characters use “Mark” as though it were his surname — even though none of them are on friendly terms with him, except for Komai toward the end. It’s hard to believe the filmmakers weren’t aware of American name order; maybe they just found “Mark” (or “Maaku”) easier to pronounce than “Jackson.” Anyway, apparently Toho was hoping to spin Jackson off into a series, but it never came to pass. Just as well; aside from his fluency in the language, Dunham isn’t all that interesting an actor. I wonder if these other films would’ve been kaiju movies or just caper movies. With this film as the source, it could’ve gone either way.

—

King Kong Escapes was a 1967 co-production of Toho and the American Rankin-Bass studio (producers of all those badly done stop-motion holiday specials in the ’70s and an early animated version of The Hobbit), loosely based on The King Kong Show, a cartoon that R-B coproduced with Toei (now known for Super Sentai/Power Rangers) in the first instance of an American cartoon being produced in Japan. This was Ishiro Honda’s next kaiju film after War of the Gargantuas, since the previous two Godzilla films (Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla) had been directed by Jun Fukuda; however, Honda would return to Godzilla with his next film, Destroy All Monsters.

King Kong Escapes is not really in continuity with Kong’s earlier appearance in King Kong vs. Godzilla; there, Kong was blown up to 45 meters/148 feet to match Godzilla’s size, but here he’s a mere 18 meters/60 feet, closer to his size in his US film appearances (though still nearly 3 times larger than the ’33 original). Also, the name of Kong’s home island is changed from Faro to Mondo.

The film goes for a James Bond flavor in its villainy. We open at the Arctic base of the villain (Eisei Amamoto, dubbed by Paul Frees in the English version), whose name, amusingly enough, is Dr. Who. With his white hair, black cloak, and fur hat in the outdoors scenes, he actually looks a bit like a Japanese version of William Hartnell’s Doctor, albeit with a rather Capaldi-esque set of attack eyebrows. He’s working with, I kid you not, Madame Piranha (Mie Hama, a recent veteran of You Only Live Twice and of King Kong vs. Godzilla before that). She’s an agent of an unnamed Asian country with ambitions for conquest, and she’s hired Dr. Who to dig up the powerful, radioactive Element X in order to turn her country into a nuclear superpower. (But not an ultra-superpower — that’s Chemical X!) For some reason, his idea of the perfect digging tool is Mechani-Kong, a robotic replica of King Kong. Yes, Kong got a robot double seven years before Godzilla! But M-K is overwhelmed by the radiation of the element before it can get far.

Luckily for the villains, our heroes have stopped in at Kong’s island. The lead, played by Rhodes Reason, is a UN submarine commander named Carl Nelson — a name that evokes both Carl Denham from the original King Kong and the Denham-like villain Clark Nelson from Mothra, although he’s based more on Admiral Nelson from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Reason did his lines in English, and although IMDb claims his lines were dubbed by British actor David de Keyser (who’s actually done voice work in Doctor Who), the 2005 edition from Netflix definitely features Reason’s own voice. Anyway, he’s partnered with his first mate Jiro Nomura (perennial Toho lead actor Akira Takarada) and the designated Fay Wray, nurse Susan Watson (Linda Miller, an American model living in Japan, whose only other film credit was the MGM/Toei co-production The Green Slime). After they witness a rubber-suit re-enactment of Kong’s death match with the T. rex (here played by the kaiju Gorosaurus, who would return blown up to Godzilla size in Destroy All Monsters), they find that Kong’s weakness for pretty blondes is intact, and Susan’s able to make him do as she asks. Which leads Dr. Who, who turns out to be Nelson’s arch-nemesis, to arrange to kidnap Nelson, Susan, and Jiro and make her control Kong. Although this happens before he undertakes an interim plan to control Kong with hypnosis. Dr. Who makes an unconvincing attempt to bluff Nelson into cooperation by threatening to kill Jiro and Susan, even though Susan’s the one he needs alive; logically he should’ve threatened the men to get her cooperation, but that would’ve required actually giving a woman agency, and we can’t have that, I guess. Mme. Piranha has some agency at first, I guess, but her attempt to seduce Nelson into cooperation leads her to do a near-instantaneous flip-flop to the good guys’ side, actually saying “I’m sorry my country was so wrong.”

Anyway, Kong lives up to the title by escaping, and Dr. Who sends Mechani-Kong after him, the chase coincidentally but inevitably ending up in Tokyo, where our heroes (helped to escape by Piranha) warn the authorities not to make Kong angry by shooting at him, because they wouldn’t like him when — no, wait, that’s someone else. But just when Susan’s gotten Kong calmed down, Mechani-Kong crashes in and grabs her, and Kong chases it up Tokyo Tower for the climactic confrontation. Which, I have to say, makes far more sense as a King Kong ’33 homage than the 45-meter Kong’s attempt to climb the 65-meter Diet Building in KKvG. Since it’s a Japanese film, it’s up to Jiro to save the girl while Nelson stands by watching; and then it’s up to Kong to go after Dr. Who and, err, force him to regenerate.

I wouldn’t call this a great film, but I like it better than the previous couple of Godzilla films from Jun Fukuda. (Ebirah was actually another Rankin-Bass project that started out as a King Kong film before being switched to Godzilla.) It’s in a fairly light vein, much like those films, but somewhat older-skewing, with a fair amount of deadly gunplay.  It feels more like a spiritual sequel to Honda’s Frankenstein duology, though it’s goofier than either of those. The War of the Gargantuas changed the caveman-like title character of Frankenstein Conquers the World into the Sasquatch-like Sanda; this film takes it a step further, from giant caveman to giant ape-man to pure giant ape. And just as Sanda was more unambiguously benevolent and less tragic than Frankenstein, so King Kong is an even friendlier monster (with an inexplicably keen grasp of English, or Japanese, vocabulary, given how easily he can be ordered around) who gets a happier ending. But happy or not, it was a definitive ending. This is the last Toho-produced film outside of the Godzilla and Mothra series to feature a heroic kaiju.

Thoughts on Toho’s Frankenstein duology (spoilers)

As I mentioned in my last Godzilla review post, I thought I might try to track down some of the films Toho made in the ’60s and ’70s about other kaiju. The available selection is piecemeal, but I’ve managed to track down a number of them. I’ll begin with the loose duology based on Frankenstein, which were the first kaiju films co-produced by an American studio. I hadn’t been able to find a copy of the first film through rental or the library, but I finally figured out how to use the statewide interlibrary loan system and found a copy in Cleveland. And while the English dub of the second film is available at Hulu and elsewhere, my local library had a copy with the Japanese audio as well. So, yay, libraries!

—

Frankenstein Conquers the World, aka Frankenstein vs. Baragon (full title Frankenstein vs. Subterranean Monster Baragon), came out in 1965, between the first two King Ghidorah films in the Godzilla series. It was originally based on (or plagiarized from) a treatment for an American King Kong vs. Frankenstein movie, then planned as a Frankenstein/Godzilla match-up to follow King Kong vs. Godzilla, but the plan to make Godzilla the hero didn’t make sense at the time, so they fortunately did the superb Mothra vs. Godzilla instead, eventually reworking their Frankenstein treatment with a new kaiju, Baragon, in Godzilla’s place, and Frankenstein as the hero. Confusing, no? (And yes, it should be Frankenstein’s Monster, but they call it Frankenstein here — or rather, Furankenshutain.) The film was partly financed by the American animation studio UPA, and it was plotted in part by American SF author Jerry Sohl, the writer of my favorite Star Trek episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver.” To appeal to an American audience, Nick Adams was imported from the US and cast in the lead role (the first of his two consecutive kaiju-film appearances, followed by Invasion of Astro-Monster).

The film begins in 1945 with German soldiers confiscating a beating heart in a trunk, loading it on a German sub, and delivering it to a Japanese sub. During the transfer, an Allied bomber sights sub, sinks same, but second sub scarpers safely. The sub’s Captain Kawai (Yoshio Tsuchiya) takes the cargo to a Japanese hospital, where a scientist (Takashi Shimura, who played Dr. Yamane in Gojira) explains to Kawai that it’s the indestructible heart of Frankenstein(‘s Monster), which they intend to study in hopes of using its regenerative properties to make soldiers indestructible. (Implicitly, this is a rough sequel to earlier American or British Frankenstein films, with Frankie’s immortal heart explaining his ability to come back to life over and over.) Unluckily for them, the hospital is in Hiroshima and it’s August 6…

Cut to 15 years later, and the Hiroshima International Institute of Radio Therapentics [sic]. There we find Dr. James Bowen, played by an English-speaking Adams with his dialogue dubbed in Japanese by Goro Naya. (In the English-language version, Adams redubbed his own dialogue.) He and his colleagues, Dr. Sueko Togami (Kumi Mizuno) and Dr. Ken’ichiro Kawaji (Tadao Takashima) are studying victims of radiation exposure and trying to develop cures, but the mood is somber as many of their patients face slow but certain death.

Bowen and Sueko discover a feral “waif” child that’s been wandering around Hiroshima killing small animals for food — something that was sadly common after the bomb, but odd over a decade and a half later. Sueko gives him food, which comes in handy later when the authorities corner him in a cave and Sueko and Bowen are able to bring him in peacefully to the Institute of Misspelled Therapeutics, where they find that he’s pure Caucasian (though he’s played by Sumio Nakao with green contacts and a Frankensteinian beetle brow and wig) and inexplicably resistant to radiation. He’s nonverbal but intelligent, and he’s quick to anger but not inclined to hurt people, especially Sueko. They determine that he was seen years earlier around the ruins of the hospital from the opening sequence, but how could he have survived being abandoned from infancy?

Captain Kawai, now working at an oil rig in Akita, witnesses its collapse in an “earthquake,” though we get a glimpse of a burrowing kaiju with a glowing nose horn. Later, he reads the news reports about the Boy (as Sueko calls him, even though he’s grown up and is now played by Koji Furuhata), who’s continued to grow at an accelerating rate, is now nearly two stories tall, and is rather cruelly being kept chained in a cage, with the shackle digging into his growing wrist. Kawai tells Bowen’s trio about Frankenstein’s heart, suggesting that the boy could’ve regenerated from it. Dr. Kawaji goes to Frankfurt to find the German scientist from the opening scenes, who advocates chopping off the boy’s arm or leg to see if it grows back, thereby proving he’s Frankenstein reborn. Horrifically, Kawaji thinks this is a peachy-keen idea, though Bowen and Sueko are morally opposed. But they’re too busy flirting over dinner, so Kawaji sneaks in to conduct the amputation experiment himself. (Sheesh, couldn’t you limit it to a small toe, say?) He has pangs of conscience and is interrupted by a TV crew whose bright lights enrage the Boy, causing him to break out of his cage and escape, stopping to peer into Sueko’s second-floor window and have a bonding moment before the cops drive him off.

Investigating the cage, the reporters find the shackle unbroken — and then are horrified to find Frankenstein’s severed hand crawling under its own power. They alert the scientists, who take it to the lab for study. Bowen has been urging the military and the media not to kill Frankie, since studying his regeneration and radiation resistance could be essential for science — much the same argument that Dr. Yamane used to argue against killing Godzilla in 1954. But with the hand, err, in hand, Kawaji argues that keeping Frankie alive is less essential. Anyway, Frankie manages to elude pursuit and live off wild game and raided livestock. He’s reached 20 meters and somehow his clothes have grown with him, though they eventually get tattered and replaced with skins. (It’s never explicitly stated that Frankie’s growth is the result of the heart’s radiation exposure in Hiroshima, but it stands to reason, since Frankenstein never became a giant before. If so, this would be the first kaiju-film appearance of the idea of radiation creating gigantism, an idea the Heisei era would return to.)

Finally, Baragon makes his first full appearance. He’s a weird kaiju, with lizard legs, a sort of armadillo-ish back, batlike ears, and a goofy, big-eyed face with a glowing nose horn. Frankenstein gets blamed for Baragon’s destruction and the military’s hunting him in full force, but the hand has died from insufficient nourishment as it grew, so the Three Scienceketeers need him alive again. Captain Kawai once again shows up to provide plot-advancing exposition, having realized that the glowing monster from the Akita earthquake is behind the carnage. Somehow, he deduces that it’s an ancient dinosaur that survived the cooling of the Earth (one of the dinosaur-extinction theories at the time) by moving deep underground. The scientific community scoffs, suggesting this wasn’t intended at the time to be in continuity with the Godzilla series, despite Baragon’s later cameo appearance in Destroy All Monsters. So Frankenstein is still being hunted, and only our three heroes are left to attempt to contain Frankie by finding where he’s most likely to go (Mt. Fuji, for a cool climate like his native Germany — indeed, it was snowing in the opening despite it being August) and airlift food there to keep him from roaming.

But Kawaji still has a more aggressive agenda, and his plan to kill Frankenstein and sample his remains happens to enrage Baragon, who goes on a rampage, endangering Sueko. Frankenstein comes to her rescue and the marquee fight is underway. It’s more fast-paced and acrobatic than your usual kaiju fight, since Furuhata is unencumbered by a heavy rubber suit — though Baragon (played by Godzilla suit actor Haruo Nakajima) is pretty lively too, prone to wire-assisted leaping. During the fight, Kawaji is endangered and Frankenstein saves him, gently carrying him back to Bowen and Sueko. The battle leads to a massive forest fire which provides a dramatic backdrop for the climactic battle, until Frankenstein snaps Baragon’s neck and then the ground (weakened by Baragon’s burrowing) collapses and sucks them both into the Earth. Kawaji learns his lesson and assures Sueko that Frankenstein cannot die, but Bowen has inexplicably had a change of heart too and ends the movie by saying he’d be better off dead because he’s just a monster. Huh? (The English dub goes with a slightly kinder “He couldn’t live in this world.”)

However, the 1985 “international” version restores a long-lost alternate ending the filmmakers shot at the request of their American co-producers, who were oddly enamored of the giant octopus fight in King Kong vs. Godzilla and wanted to see a similar scene here, whether it made sense or not. Ishiro Honda and his team grudgingly shot the scene, but ultimately left it out of both the Japanese and American editions — and it’s easy to see why. After Frankenstein kills Baragon, suddenly a giant octopus shows up out of nowhere — yes, a sea creature crawling on land — and flails nonthreateningly while Frankenstein attacks it and wraps its tentacles around himself to mime being grabbed, until they both fall into a lake that suddenly happens to be there, before we segue back to the final conversation. It’s an absolutely terrible, pointless ending and it should never have been restored as anything but a deleted scene. If you see this movie on the Tokyo Shock DVD, do yourself a favor and watch the “theatrical” Japanese version rather than “international.” (Meanwhile, the original US version incorporated a few more added shots of Frankenstein inflicting destruction during his rampage, but apparently no widescreen prints of this material survive, so they’re missing from the reconstructed English-language edition on the DVD set, though included in low quality as bonus features.)

The alternate ending aside, this is a really impressive film. It’s the darkest, most somber kaiju film since the original Gojira, with a similar acknowledgment of the suffering caused by the atomic bomb. The fact that the monster is essentially human makes him unusually sympathetic and lends a darker quality to the discussions about hunting the monster down and killing it. Baragon’s inclusion seems kind of random at first, but it serves a purpose once Frankenstein gets blamed for its attacks, and though it’s a silly-looking monster, the big battle is quite effective. Akira Ifukube’s score is moody and effective, and makes heavy use of what was apparently the only bass flute in Japan at the time. It’s surprising to see such a solemn, dramatic kaiju film in 1965, when the Godzilla films were starting to become lighter and sillier.

—

The following year, Toho made a sequel under the name Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira, known in the US as The War of the Gargantuas. It’s an odd kind of sequel, though. Storywise, it’s a direct continuation of FCtW, with abundant references to that film’s events, and the lead trio are clearly meant to be the same characters. And yet all three leads are renamed and two are recast. Bowen is now Stewart (Russ Tamblyn, dubbed by Goro Mutsumi), Kawaji is now Majida (Kenji Sahara), and though the lovely Kumi Mizuno fortunately returns, she’s now Akemi rather than Sueko. (Some sources attribute the cast change to Nick Adams’s death, but that was two years after this.) They’re now based in Kyoto rather than Hiroshima. And the Frankenstein design has been changed to a full suit and mask that’s more apelike than before. There’s even a new flashback to Frankenstein’s childhood in which he looks more like a baby orangutan than a deformed human. It’s really weird that they made these changes, but it’s possible to look past the surface alterations and see the direct sequel it was meant to be.

It begins with the very scene the American investors wanted FCtW to end with, a battle between a Frankenstein and a giant octopus. They were really determined to get that octopus fight one way or another. This time it’s at sea, and the octopus attacks a smugglers’ boat before being attacked in turn by a hairy green ape-giant (not jolly at all), who then launches his own attack on the boat and eats all but one of its crew. (No doubt the redundant giant octopus was forced into what was meant to be a more straightforward scene of the sea giant destroying the boat.)  The survivor’s story of seeing “a Frankenstein” isn’t believed at first, but soon the creature attacks an airport, and the hunt is on. Much of the first half of the movie is the military hunting what they believe to be Frankenstein while our scientist heroes investigate, doubting the story. The Frankenstein they knew wasn’t a sea dweller like this creature, and there’s evidence of giant footprints in the mountains.

There’s an interlude where the green giant attacks an American singer (Kipp Hamilton) right after she sings a really dreadful song called “The Words Get Stuck in My Throat.” Now, this was a song I’d heard before in the Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated episode “Battle of the Humongonauts,” which I hadn’t realized was meant to be an homage to this film. I’d assumed the song had been written for the cartoon as a joke — I couldn’t believe anyone would write a song that bad in earnest. (Seriously, why couldn’t the monster have attacked Hamilton three minutes earlier?) Now I wish I’d seen this movie before that episode, so I could’ve watched out for more homages.

Anyway, the musical score makes plenty of use of one of Akira Ifukube’s most memorable military marches, the “Operation L March” (part of which was reused in the Destroy All Monsters title theme two years later, and the entirety of which was reused in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in 1994) as the Self Defense Force prepares and launches its assault on the green kaiju. The assault sequence features the debut of the iconic Maser Cannon tanks which would reappear in later Godzilla films, perhaps the strongest continuity link (such as it is) between the Frankenstein films and the Godzilla series. The kaiju is injured and almost defeated when a second, tan-haired giant with slightly more human features and oddly scaly skin comes to its rescue and helps it to safety. This creature’s musical theme is just a slight variation on Frankenstein’s theme, which tells us what the three scientists soon figure out: That this is the original Frankenstein, the one they cared for in the past. If you squint a little, you can almost buy that this is the mature, hairier form of the earlier adolescent Frankenstein, or that he’s undergone some secondary mutation since we last saw him. The military dubs the maneating green creature Gaira (from kai, meaning sea) and the sandy-colored one Sanda (from san, meaning mountain).

The scientists conclude that Gaira is a clone grown from some cells that Frankenstein shed from an injury in the lake where he was briefly seen in the first movie, which somehow explains Gaira’s aquatic nature. This means they can’t just blow up the Frankensteins without spawning hundreds. Our heroes try to convince the military that Sanda, at least, should be protected, but the general just wants to use napalm and chemical weapons to destroy both giants utterly. After a pastoral interlude, Akemi/Sueko falls off a cliff and Sanda/Frankenstein breaks his leg saving her. He returns to his clone-bro and sees something that enrages him — it took me a couple of viewings to figure out that it was the clothing of a pair of vacationing boaters we’d seen earlier, now eaten by Gaira. A furious Sanda beats Gaira with a tree and drives him away.

Gaira ends up attacking Tokyo and Sanda comes after him. The military intends to attack them both, and Akemi/Sueko gets hurt trying to warn him, whereupon Stewart/Bowen confesses his love for her. I think the scientists’ arguments got through, though, since the military only shoots at Gaira while he and Sanda fight in the streets and docks of Tokyo, smashing the surrounding buildings with implausible, Man of Steel-like ease. (These kaiju are a lot smaller than Godzilla and his peers, so it doesn’t seem they’d be heavy enough to smash buildings that effortlessly.) Eventually their battle carries them out to sea, and the filmmakers must’ve been running out of ideas at this point, because suddenly an undersea volcano erupts and apparently burns up both Frankensteins, though it’s ambiguous enough to leave room for more sequels.

Even aside from the bizarre and gratuitous changes, this film is inferior to its original. It’s basically just more of the same, but without the ambiguity, since the heroes are all on the same page, convinced that Sanda/Frankenstein is a good guy and it’s just another case of mistaken identity, and Sanda himself is more saintly and less of a tragic, tortured figure than the previous film’s Frankenstein. Changing the kaiju to full-suit monsters makes them less human and less engaging (though at least they have visible human eyes). And too much of the run time is devoted to military maneuvers and attacks on Gaira.

The 1970 English-language version severs all connections to Frankenstein — perhaps because American audiences would’ve been puzzled by the reinterpretation of Frankenstein’s Monster as a Bigfoot-like giant? Instead, it posits the existence of hypothetical giant cryptids called Gargantuas — swapping out Mary Shelley for Rabelais. (It’s amusing to see the surviving smuggler mouthing “Furankenshutain!” and hearing “Gi-i-aant!” dubbed over it.) Gaira and Sanda are unimaginatively redubbed Green Gargantua and Brown Gargantua. (Poor Pantagruel gets left out.) Stewart is now just an expert in giant creatures rather than a Frankenstein expert, and he’s introduced earlier in the film, with several early scenes reshot to include him. (This actually fixes a major continuity error in the Japanese edition, which has the reporters show up to question Stewart about Frankenstein mere moments after he was first contacted, as part of the same scene. Here, there are several scenes between the initial contact and the press conference.) I believe this version also hints at the possibility of a second giant much sooner than the Japanese version does, which somewhat undermines the suspense. It also abandons all uses of Ifukube’s “Operation L March” in favor of the frequent use of a stock music cue that I got really sick of listening to after a while. Unfortunately, it keeps “Stuck in My Throat.” I fast-forwarded through a lot of this version. And somehow, with Russ Tamblyn dubbing his own lines in English, it’s easier to notice how lazily he walked through the part. In keeping with his lack of passion, the bit where he confesses his feelings for Akemi ends up as “I thought I’d lost an assistant.” All around, the English dub is an inferior version of an inferior sequel. Too bad, since Frankenstein Conquers the World is one of the very best kaiju films I’ve seen.

Thoughts on Toho’s Frankenstein duology

As I mentioned in my last Godzilla review post, I thought I might try to track down some of the films Toho made in the ’60s and ’70s about other kaiju. The available selection is piecemeal, but I’ve managed to track down a number of them. I’ll begin with the loose duology based on Frankenstein, which were the first kaiju films co-produced by an American studio. I hadn’t been able to find a copy of the first film through rental or the library, but I finally figured out how to use the statewide interlibrary loan system and found a copy in Cleveland. And while the English dub of the second film is available at Hulu and elsewhere, my local library had a copy with the Japanese audio as well. So, yay, libraries!

—

Frankenstein Conquers the World, aka Frankenstein vs. Baragon (full title Frankenstein vs. Subterranean Monster Baragon), came out in 1965, between the first two King Ghidorah films in the Godzilla series. It was originally based on (or plagiarized from) a treatment for an American King Kong vs. Frankenstein movie, then planned as a Frankenstein/Godzilla match-up to follow King Kong vs. Godzilla, but the plan to make Godzilla the hero didn’t make sense at the time, so they fortunately did the superb Mothra vs. Godzilla instead, eventually reworking their Frankenstein treatment with a new kaiju, Baragon, in Godzilla’s place, and Frankenstein as the hero. Confusing, no? (And yes, it should be Frankenstein’s Monster, but they call it Frankenstein here — or rather, Furankenshutain.) The film was partly financed by the American animation studio UPA, and it was plotted in part by American SF author Jerry Sohl, the writer of my favorite Star Trek episode, “The Corbomite Maneuver.” To appeal to an American audience, Nick Adams was imported from the US and cast in the lead role (the first of his two consecutive kaiju-film appearances, followed by Invasion of Astro-Monster).

The film begins in 1945 with German soldiers confiscating a beating heart in a trunk, loading it on a German sub, and delivering it to a Japanese sub. During the transfer, an Allied bomber sights sub, sinks same, but second sub scarpers safely. The sub’s Captain Kawai (Yoshio Tsuchiya) takes the cargo to a Japanese hospital, where a scientist (Takashi Shimura, who played Dr. Yamane in Gojira) explains to Kawai that it’s the indestructible heart of Frankenstein(‘s Monster), which they intend to study in hopes of using its regenerative properties to make soldiers indestructible. (Implicitly, this is a rough sequel to earlier American or British Frankenstein films, with Frankie’s immortal heart explaining his ability to come back to life over and over.) Unluckily for them, the hospital is in Hiroshima and it’s August 6…

Cut to 15 years later, and the Hiroshima International Institute of Radio Therapentics [sic]. There we find Dr. James Bowen, played by an English-speaking Adams with his dialogue dubbed in Japanese by Goro Naya. (In the English-language version, Adams redubbed his own dialogue.) He and his colleagues, Dr. Sueko Togami (Kumi Mizuno) and Dr. Ken’ichiro Kawaji (Tadao Takashima) are studying victims of radiation exposure and trying to develop cures, but the mood is somber as many of their patients face slow but certain death.

Bowen and Sueko discover a feral “waif” child that’s been wandering around Hiroshima killing small animals for food — something that was sadly common after the bomb, but odd over a decade and a half later. Sueko gives him food, which comes in handy later when the authorities corner him in a cave and Sueko and Bowen are able to bring him in peacefully to the Institute of Misspelled Therapeutics, where they find that he’s pure Caucasian (though he’s played by Sumio Nakao with green contacts and a Frankensteinian beetle brow and wig) and inexplicably resistant to radiation. He’s nonverbal but intelligent, and he’s quick to anger but not inclined to hurt people, especially Sueko. They determine that he was seen years earlier around the ruins of the hospital from the opening sequence, but how could he have survived being abandoned from infancy?

Captain Kawai, now working at an oil rig in Akita, witnesses its collapse in an “earthquake,” though we get a glimpse of a burrowing kaiju with a glowing nose horn. Later, he reads the news reports about the Boy (as Sueko calls him, even though he’s grown up and is now played by Koji Furuhata), who’s continued to grow at an accelerating rate, is now nearly two stories tall, and is rather cruelly being kept chained in a cage, with the shackle digging into his growing wrist. Kawai tells Bowen’s trio about Frankenstein’s heart, suggesting that the boy could’ve regenerated from it. Dr. Kawaji goes to Frankfurt to find the German scientist from the opening scenes, who advocates chopping off the boy’s arm or leg to see if it grows back, thereby proving he’s Frankenstein reborn. Horrifically, Kawaji thinks this is a peachy-keen idea, though Bowen and Sueko are morally opposed. But they’re too busy flirting over dinner, so Kawaji sneaks in to conduct the amputation experiment himself. (Sheesh, couldn’t you limit it to a small toe, say?) He has pangs of conscience and is interrupted by a TV crew whose bright lights enrage the Boy, causing him to break out of his cage and escape, stopping to peer into Sueko’s second-floor window and have a bonding moment before the cops drive him off.

Investigating the cage, the reporters find the shackle unbroken — and then are horrified to find Frankenstein’s severed hand crawling under its own power. They alert the scientists, who take it to the lab for study. Bowen has been urging the military and the media not to kill Frankie, since studying his regeneration and radiation resistance could be essential for science — much the same argument that Dr. Yamane used to argue against killing Godzilla in 1954. But with the hand, err, in hand, Kawaji argues that keeping Frankie alive is less essential. Anyway, Frankie manages to elude pursuit and live off wild game and raided livestock. He’s reached 20 meters and somehow his clothes have grown with him, though they eventually get tattered and replaced with skins. (It’s never explicitly stated that Frankie’s growth is the result of the heart’s radiation exposure in Hiroshima, but it stands to reason, since Frankenstein never became a giant before. If so, this would be the first kaiju-film appearance of the idea of radiation creating gigantism, an idea the Heisei era would return to.)

Finally, Baragon makes his first full appearance. He’s a weird kaiju, with lizard legs, a sort of armadillo-ish back, batlike ears, and a goofy, big-eyed face with a glowing nose horn. Frankenstein gets blamed for Baragon’s destruction and the military’s hunting him in full force, but the hand has died from insufficient nourishment as it grew, so the Three Scienceketeers need him alive again. Captain Kawai once again shows up to provide plot-advancing exposition, having realized that the glowing monster from the Akita earthquake is behind the carnage. Somehow, he deduces that it’s an ancient dinosaur that survived the cooling of the Earth (one of the dinosaur-extinction theories at the time) by moving deep underground. The scientific community scoffs, suggesting this wasn’t intended at the time to be in continuity with the Godzilla series, despite Baragon’s later cameo appearance in Destroy All Monsters. So Frankenstein is still being hunted, and only our three heroes are left to attempt to contain Frankie by finding where he’s most likely to go (Mt. Fuji, for a cool climate like his native Germany — indeed, it was snowing in the opening despite it being August) and airlift food there to keep him from roaming.

But Kawaji still has a more aggressive agenda, and his plan to kill Frankenstein and sample his remains happens to enrage Baragon, who goes on a rampage, endangering Sueko. Frankenstein comes to her rescue and the marquee fight is underway. It’s more fast-paced and acrobatic than your usual kaiju fight, since Furuhata is unencumbered by a heavy rubber suit — though Baragon (played by Godzilla suit actor Haruo Nakajima) is pretty lively too, prone to wire-assisted leaping. During the fight, Kawaji is endangered and Frankenstein saves him, gently carrying him back to Bowen and Sueko. The battle leads to a massive forest fire which provides a dramatic backdrop for the climactic battle, until Frankenstein snaps Baragon’s neck and then the ground (weakened by Baragon’s burrowing) collapses and sucks them both into the Earth. Kawaji learns his lesson and assures Sueko that Frankenstein cannot die, but Bowen has inexplicably had a change of heart too and ends the movie by saying he’d be better off dead because he’s just a monster. Huh? (The English dub goes with a slightly kinder “He couldn’t live in this world.”)

However, the 1985 “international” version restores a long-lost alternate ending the filmmakers shot at the request of their American co-producers, who were oddly enamored of the giant octopus fight in King Kong vs. Godzilla and wanted to see a similar scene here, whether it made sense or not. Ishiro Honda and his team grudgingly shot the scene, but ultimately left it out of both the Japanese and American editions — and it’s easy to see why. After Frankenstein kills Baragon, suddenly a giant octopus shows up out of nowhere — yes, a sea creature crawling on land — and flails nonthreateningly while Frankenstein attacks it and wraps its tentacles around himself to mime being grabbed, until they both fall into a lake that suddenly happens to be there, before we segue back to the final conversation. It’s an absolutely terrible, pointless ending and it should never have been restored as anything but a deleted scene. If you see this movie on the Tokyo Shock DVD, do yourself a favor and watch the “theatrical” Japanese version rather than “international.” (Meanwhile, the original US version incorporated a few more added shots of Frankenstein inflicting destruction during his rampage, but apparently no widescreen prints of this material survive, so they’re missing from the reconstructed English-language edition on the DVD set, though included in low quality as bonus features.)

The alternate ending aside, this is a really impressive film. It’s the darkest, most somber kaiju film since the original Gojira, with a similar acknowledgment of the suffering caused by the atomic bomb. The fact that the monster is essentially human makes him unusually sympathetic and lends a darker quality to the discussions about hunting the monster down and killing it. Baragon’s inclusion seems kind of random at first, but it serves a purpose once Frankenstein gets blamed for its attacks, and though it’s a silly-looking monster, the big battle is quite effective. Akira Ifukube’s score is moody and effective, and makes heavy use of what was apparently the only bass flute in Japan at the time. It’s surprising to see such a solemn, dramatic kaiju film in 1965, when the Godzilla films were starting to become lighter and sillier.

—

The following year, Toho made a sequel under the name Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira, known in the US as The War of the Gargantuas. It’s an odd kind of sequel, though. Storywise, it’s a direct continuation of FCtW, with abundant references to that film’s events, and the lead trio are clearly meant to be the same characters. And yet all three leads are renamed and two are recast. Bowen is now Stewart (Russ Tamblyn, dubbed by Goro Mutsumi), Kawaji is now Majida (Kenji Sahara), and though the lovely Kumi Mizuno fortunately returns, she’s now Akemi rather than Sueko. (Some sources attribute the cast change to Nick Adams’s death, but that was two years after this.) They’re now based in Kyoto rather than Hiroshima. And the Frankenstein design has been changed to a full suit and mask that’s more apelike than before. There’s even a new flashback to Frankenstein’s childhood in which he looks more like a baby orangutan than a deformed human. It’s really weird that they made these changes, but it’s possible to look past the surface alterations and see the direct sequel it was meant to be.

It begins with the very scene the American investors wanted FCtW to end with, a battle between a Frankenstein and a giant octopus. They were really determined to get that octopus fight one way or another. This time it’s at sea, and the octopus attacks a smugglers’ boat before being attacked in turn by a hairy green ape-giant (not jolly at all), who then launches his own attack on the boat and eats all but one of its crew. (No doubt the redundant giant octopus was forced into what was meant to be a more straightforward scene of the sea giant destroying the boat.)  The survivor’s story of seeing “a Frankenstein” isn’t believed at first, but soon the creature attacks an airport, and the hunt is on. Much of the first half of the movie is the military hunting what they believe to be Frankenstein while our scientist heroes investigate, doubting the story. The Frankenstein they knew wasn’t a sea dweller like this creature, and there’s evidence of giant footprints in the mountains.

There’s an interlude where the green giant attacks an American singer (Kipp Hamilton) right after she sings a really dreadful song called “The Words Get Stuck in My Throat.” Now, this was a song I’d heard before in the Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated episode “Battle of the Humongonauts,” which I hadn’t realized was meant to be an homage to this film. I’d assumed the song had been written for the cartoon as a joke — I couldn’t believe anyone would write a song that bad in earnest. (Seriously, why couldn’t the monster have attacked Hamilton three minutes earlier?) Now I wish I’d seen this movie before that episode, so I could’ve watched out for more homages.

Anyway, the musical score makes plenty of use of one of Akira Ifukube’s most memorable military marches, the “Operation L March” (part of which was reused in the Destroy All Monsters title theme two years later, and the entirety of which was reused in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in 1994) as the Self Defense Force prepares and launches its assault on the green kaiju. The assault sequence features the debut of the iconic Maser Cannon tanks which would reappear in later Godzilla films, perhaps the strongest continuity link (such as it is) between the Frankenstein films and the Godzilla series. The kaiju is injured and almost defeated when a second, tan-haired giant with slightly more human features and oddly scaly skin comes to its rescue and helps it to safety. This creature’s musical theme is just a slight variation on Frankenstein’s theme, which tells us what the three scientists soon figure out: That this is the original Frankenstein, the one they cared for in the past. If you squint a little, you can almost buy that this is the mature, hairier form of the earlier adolescent Frankenstein, or that he’s undergone some secondary mutation since we last saw him. The military dubs the maneating green creature Gaira (from kai, meaning sea) and the sandy-colored one Sanda (from san, meaning mountain).

The scientists conclude that Gaira is a clone grown from some cells that Frankenstein shed from an injury in the lake where he was briefly seen in the first movie, which somehow explains Gaira’s aquatic nature. This means they can’t just blow up the Frankensteins without spawning hundreds. Our heroes try to convince the military that Sanda, at least, should be protected, but the general just wants to use napalm and chemical weapons to destroy both giants utterly. After a pastoral interlude, Akemi/Sueko falls off a cliff and Sanda/Frankenstein breaks his leg saving her. He returns to his clone-bro and sees something that enrages him — it took me a couple of viewings to figure out that it was the clothing of a pair of vacationing boaters we’d seen earlier, now eaten by Gaira. A furious Sanda beats Gaira with a tree and drives him away.

Gaira ends up attacking Tokyo and Sanda comes after him. The military intends to attack them both, and Akemi/Sueko gets hurt trying to warn him, whereupon Stewart/Bowen confesses his love for her. I think the scientists’ arguments got through, though, since the military only shoots at Gaira while he and Sanda fight in the streets and docks of Tokyo, smashing the surrounding buildings with implausible, Man of Steel-like ease. (These kaiju are a lot smaller than Godzilla and his peers, so it doesn’t seem they’d be heavy enough to smash buildings that effortlessly.) Eventually their battle carries them out to sea, and the filmmakers must’ve been running out of ideas at this point, because suddenly an undersea volcano erupts and apparently burns up both Frankensteins, though it’s ambiguous enough to leave room for more sequels.

Even aside from the bizarre and gratuitous changes, this film is inferior to its original. It’s basically just more of the same, but without the ambiguity, since the heroes are all on the same page, convinced that Sanda/Frankenstein is a good guy and it’s just another case of mistaken identity, and Sanda himself is more saintly and less of a tragic, tortured figure than the previous film’s Frankenstein. Changing the kaiju to full-suit monsters makes them less human and less engaging (though at least they have visible human eyes). And too much of the run time is devoted to military maneuvers and attacks on Gaira.

The 1970 English-language version severs all connections to Frankenstein — perhaps because American audiences would’ve been puzzled by the reinterpretation of Frankenstein’s Monster as a Bigfoot-like giant? Instead, it posits the existence of hypothetical giant cryptids called Gargantuas — swapping out Mary Shelley for Rabelais. (It’s amusing to see the surviving smuggler mouthing “Furankenshutain!” and hearing “Gi-i-aant!” dubbed over it.) Gaira and Sanda are unimaginatively redubbed Green Gargantua and Brown Gargantua. (Poor Pantagruel gets left out.) Stewart is now just an expert in giant creatures rather than a Frankenstein expert, and he’s introduced earlier in the film, with several early scenes reshot to include him. (This actually fixes a major continuity error in the Japanese edition, which has the reporters show up to question Stewart about Frankenstein mere moments after he was first contacted, as part of the same scene. Here, there are several scenes between the initial contact and the press conference.) I believe this version also hints at the possibility of a second giant much sooner than the Japanese version does, which somewhat undermines the suspense. It also abandons all uses of Ifukube’s “Operation L March” in favor of the frequent use of a stock music cue that I got really sick of listening to after a while. Unfortunately, it keeps “Stuck in My Throat.” I fast-forwarded through a lot of this version. And somehow, with Russ Tamblyn dubbing his own lines in English, it’s easier to notice how lazily he walked through the part. In keeping with his lack of passion, the bit where he confesses his feelings for Akemi ends up as “I thought I’d lost an assistant.” All around, the English dub is an inferior version of an inferior sequel. Too bad, since Frankenstein Conquers the World is one of the very best kaiju films I’ve seen.

THE FACE OF THE UNKNOWN is done!

Hey, all. I’m still here. I’ve been kind of preoccupied with a few things this month, mainly finishing up Star Trek: The Original Series: The Face of the Unknown, which I’ve just sent off to my editor. I think it’s turned out very well, especially considering that I had all those computer problems delaying me over the past few months. Fortunately the writing went smoothly for the most part; I actually finished the first draft early, but then I realized there were some additional story threads I needed to add, and it’s taken me until last night to get those sorted out.

As for my computer, it’s been working quite smoothly so far. I’ve got just about everything up and running as it should, and I haven’t had any trouble since I finished reinstalling stuff on the replacement hard drive. I’m thinking I should look into getting a backup drive that I can clone or image my drive to on a regular basis, so that it would be easier to restore if something else goes wrong. But I’ve never really figured out how to do backups beyond just copying my documents onto removable media. (Which used to mean whole boxes full of floppy disks, and now means a tiny plastic stick in my pocket. We live in the future!)

I’ve also been working my way through a rewatch of classic Doctor Who, as I mentioned before. I’m getting near the end of the William Hartnell era now, which means I’m going to be watching a lot of reconstructions of missing episodes for a while. Though I am getting the DVD of the restored “The Tenth Planet” through interlibrary loan. I’ve only just figured out how to extend my search to other Ohio libraries and request materials from them, which has let me track down some things I could never find otherwise. That also includes some of the non-Godzilla kaiju films I’ve been looking for, so you can expect the return of my Toho review series in the near future. (Sorry it didn’t occur to me to do Doctor Who reviews. I don’t think I’d have the time anyway.)

Now that I’m done with my Trek novel, I’m hoping to spend the next month or so working on original short fiction, hopefully including at least one new Hub story. Although I’ve already been delayed getting to that by my computer problems, so I hope nothing else comes up to divert me.

In the more immediate term, I should probably go for a walk today. We’re getting a spell of unseasonably warm weather hereabouts, after a bitter cold snap last week. Although in this age of climate change, we’ll probably have to throw out our past ideas of what’s unseasonable.

Speaking of which, I should probably take my car in for some maintenance soon. Over the past month, it’s had trouble getting started in cold weather — that is, the engine starts, but the car initially resists moving when I step on the gas. The first time it happened, I thought something must be obstructing the wheels, but nothing was. The resistance to acceleration gradually subsides, though it takes a couple of blocks to get back to normal. I figure some kind of lubricant must be depleted or in need of changing, though it seems to work okay in warmer weather or after a short enough interval of non-use. (I generally only drive once or twice a week.)

Up and running again (mostly)

As it turned out, when I contacted the suppliers of my refurbished PC to arrange for it to be shipped in for repairs, they offered to send me a replacement pre-imaged hard drive that would have a copy of the same Windows 7 operating system on it, so that I could swap it out myself. That would certainly take less time than sending the laptop back in and waiting to get it back, so I went for that. After all, I’d seen the guy at Best Buy take the hard drive out to inspect it, so I knew how to do it. Two weeks passed and no drive came, so I complained, and it arrived two days after that. I was uneasy that it had been sent in just a padded envelope instead of something sturdier, but I installed it today and it seems to be working fine. And since I just did all this a bit over a month ago, I was able to do it more efficiently this time, though it still took forever for some of the software to download from the Internet, so it took all afternoon and then some. (Though this time I backed up and copied my documents with a thumb drive rather than using the network connection between PCs, and it was far, far faster, as I’d hoped.)

Some stuff will have to wait until tomorrow, but I’ve now got the essential stuff reinstalled and working — except for my e-mail client program, eM Client. For some reason, when I installed a new copy and tried overwriting its mailbox data files with the up-to-date ones from the old drive (which I’d copied onto my old laptop as a backup and transferred back from there), it led to some kind of malfunction in the program and it crashed. I still have the data on my old computer; I just need to figure out how to get it working on my new-new computer. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong this time that’s different from when I transferred the data files the other way. I really hope I can get it figured out tomorrow. I need to get past these computer troubles once and for all so I can get back to work on my writing.

Spoilery thoughts on STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS, with spoilers, in case you were wondering (Spoilers!)

I was going to see The Force Awakens on Tuesday (which is discount day), but I did so much writing the night before that I couldn’t shut my mind down and hardly got any sleep, so I was in no condition to drive on Tuesday. I was going to wait a week, but I realized that the earliest 2D showing on any given day was cheaper than the 3D showings on Tuesdays, and I decided, what the heck, I didn’t see any of the other Star Wars movies in 3D. Plus I needed groceries and wanted to check out the new Kroger next to the theater (which turned out to be a huge shopping complex with a food court on one side and a mini-department store on the other). So I went this morning, and now I’ve finally gone from the avoiding-spoilers side to the talking-about-spoilers side. So if you’re afraid of spoilers, be warned there are spoilers here. Have I said “spoilers” enough yet? Spoilers!

Just to provide a little extra spoiler space (Spoilers!), here follows a brief anecdote of a good deed I done did on the way to the theater. As I was driving on a one-way street and came toward a red light, a car coming through on the cross street from my right started to turn the wrong way onto the one-way street. It turned out to make a full U-turn in the middle of the intersection, though I’m not sure if that was the driver’s intention or their correction after realizing their error. Either way, it wasn’t right. But anyway, the driver of the car ahead and to the right of me got out to yell at the other driver. I noticed an object fall from the yelling guy’s car, and realized it was his cell phone. So I rolled down my right-side window and yelled, “You dropped your phone, sir, you dropped your phone!” The guy picked up his phone and got back in. He didn’t thank me or anything. But if he was angry enough to get out of his car to yell at another driver, imagine how angry he might’ve been if he’d later discovered that he’d lost his phone. Maybe the favor I did was ultimately for someone else.

And now for something completely spoilery:

—

I’ve never been a huge Star Wars fan. The original trilogy was part of my childhood, along with the NPR radio series, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, and Han Solo at Stars’ End. And I still have a near-complete collection of Marvel’s original SW comic, which is just about my favorite iteration of the franchise. But it’s just something I watch and find moderately entertaining and well-made; it doesn’t have the same meaning for me that Star Trek or Doctor Who does. So I was able to come in without a lot of baggage or demands. Probably a good way to approach any movie.

Still, it was a lot of fun to see “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” and that fanfare and the opening crawl — although I was a bit disappointed that the crawl was such clean digital text instead of physically printed text scrolled over by a tilted camera, since I’m that old-school. The opening line “Luke Skywalker has vanished” is a great way to start. And I liked how the opening shot evoked the nostalgia of the original film’s opening but brought an impressive new visual and stylistic twist, with the Star Destroyer in silhouette, and then the very Abramsesque montage shots of the Stormtroopers.

I knew to expect a lot of nostalgia and homage to the original trilogy, but I’m okay with that. I think George Lucas has said that he wanted the prequel trilogy to “rhyme” with the OT, to have some similar beats in a different way, but I think this film achieved that more successfully, mixing the old with the new. I could see the resonances, but I feel they were remixed in a fresh way… err, for the most part.

In particular, J.J. Abrams (who cowrote with Lawrence Kasdan as well as directing) has always been good at focusing on the emotional core of characters and their journeys. People make fair complaints about the plot logic in his stories, but I’ve always appreciated how deeply his stories are grounded in character and emotion, which makes them work despite the holes. It’s exactly what this franchise needed after the sterility of the prequels. I love the freshness of focusing on a Stormtrooper who has a crisis of conscience and deserts. It’s nicely subversive. Until now, Stormtroopers were always faceless myrmidons who could be disposed of without qualms, but now we get to see one as a person (John Boyega’s Finn), and it’s great. (The Clone Wars achieved something similar with the Clone Troopers.) It does make it a little incongruous, though, when Finn is whooping it up at his success at blowing away his fellow Stormtroopers during his escape with Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). Still, for a Star Wars movie to even touch on the idea of violence as a difficult thing to bear on one’s conscience is a major step forward, however inconsistently it’s handled. (This is one reason I liked the Marvel comics so much — the characters there expressed a regard for life that they never expressed in the films.) I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a feature that we never get an explanation for why Finn had a conscience despite his lifelong brainwashing. It might’ve been nice to know what made him different from the others, but on the other hand, it’s nice to have a character just intrinsically have a sense of decency despite every effort to destroy it.

Finn and Poe bond pretty well in their brief time together, and Poe is reasonably charismatic and irreverent, but he doesn’t leave as much of an impression on me as the other characters, since he’s basically just a hotshot pilot and good guy, and because he’s missing for so much of the film (indeed, he was originally intended to stay dead). But after recently seeing Isaac be so effective as the bad guy and Domnhall Gleeson as the nice guy in Ex Machina (which is a fabulous film, by the way, go watch it), I was unsure how well they’d pull off the role reversal here. But Isaac was totally without the creep factor that seemed such an indelible part of his Ex Machina character — and just to get a bit ahead of the chronology here, Gleeson’s General Hux was startlingly evil and terrifying in his Hitleresque speech to the masses. They’re both quite chameleonic actors, and I’m most impressed, even if Poe is not the most impressive character on Isaac’s resume.

Speaking of lacking impressions, I’m afraid Captain Phasma didn’t live up to the hype. Or maybe she did, since she was touted as the new Boba Fett, and Boba Fett was a character who did and said so little that it always bewildered me that fans made such a big deal out of him. But I quite liked Gwendoline Christie in Wizards vs. Aliens (nope, never seen that thing with the thrones), and I wanted her to get more to do here. Hopefully we haven’t seen the last of her.

Of course, our main heroine is Daisy Ridley’s Rey, who was quite effective. Ridley is beautiful, but that’s not what she’s here to be, and she did quite well as the resourceful scavenger who’s had to pick up a lot of skills to survive and who turned out to have the makings of a hero without realizing it. (I’ll let my pal Keith DeCandido tear apart the stupid and sexist “Rey is a Mary Sue” meme.) I like her offbeat approach to problem-solving, like pulling the fuses in the maintenance ducts to open or lock doors. Her knack for piloting is nothing unusual in a franchise that’s largely about ships and pilots, and adds credence to the suspicion that she may be of Skywalker blood. She’s maybe a little underdeveloped as a character, but much of her story is clearly being held back for the next two movies. The original film at least told a complete story with closure for everyone (except poor Chewie not getting his medal) while still leaving room for more. I liked Rey in the present, but I would’ve liked more answers about her past.

Really, one thing I kept thinking while watching this movie was that I was more interested in the stuff that happened before this movie. Kylo Ren turning on Luke, Rey’s backstory, Finn’s backstory, etc. I wouldn’t mind seeing those stories told. Maybe that’ll be the next animated series after Rebels. Or maybe it’ll be in novels.

Kylo Ren wasn’t quite as iconic a villain as Darth Vader, but then, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? He’s a wannabe Vader, but he doesn’t quite have it down yet. But Adam Driver does a reasonably good job as a more angry and turmoil-driven villain than we’ve seen before; again, Abrams makes sure to ground it in emotional conflict, particularly family issues. Now, the one thing I did get spoiled on (because I read something I should’ve known to avoid) was THE big spoiler about who Kylo Ren was and what he did to Han Solo. So I knew that was coming. Even so, the way their relationship was revealed seemed a bit awkward. When Supreme Leader Snoke just casually up and said “Your father, Han Solo” in the middle of a conversation, I was thinking, “Dude, spoilers!” I would’ve expected that reveal to come more dramatically, like maybe between Han and Leia when they were reunited. Anyway, knowing what happened at the big moment didn’t hurt my enjoyment of the scene, because knowing it was coming gave it weight, and I was able to focus on the parts I didn’t know, i.e. how it happened, what was said, how it was set up. And that was done very well. Some good dialogue and acting there.

It was okay to see Han and Chewie again, still up to their old tricks. But Han was never a favorite character of mine. And they did seem to show up kind of randomly, though not as randomly as the Falcon just happening to be there on Jakku. At least we got an explanation later for how they found it. Harrison Ford did a good job, and it’s clear that Kasdan still loves writing Han. But really, it took this long for Han to try using Chewie’s bowcaster? It was nice to see Leia again too — and by the way, Internet, Carrie Fisher looks great. But it’s frustrating that we saw so little of Luke, and that we never got to hear his voice, which of course is Mark Hamill’s greatest asset as an actor. I hope he’ll have a big role in the next film.

Oh, of course I should talk about the real star of the film, BB-8. Well, the star of the first act, anyway. He is a very well-designed and well-executed character. Giving his head the ability to tilt in all directions makes him much more expressive than R2-D2 ever was. He’s a lot of fun. And he has a pretty good “voice” treatment too — distinct from R2, a bit more organic-sounding, but definitely much better than that irritating “wah-wah-wah” voice used for Chopper on Rebels.

Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata was pretty good as the Yoda-ish figure of the film, though I wonder if she could’ve been done as a puppet instead of by performance capture. I guess they wanted to get her facial performance onscreen as well as her voice. Anyway, Maz being a thousand years old is interesting; it means maybe we could see her on Rebels at some point. And Max Von Sydow’s Lor San Tekka might also appear as an associate of Bail Organa’s, say.

Storywise, I could’ve done without another plot revolving around a giant planetkiller weapon. That’s a well we’ve seen returned to a bit too often now. But as with Kylo, maybe the attempt at imitation is kind of the point — the First Order is trying to preserve the Empire, and all the Empire really had going for it was destruction. They’re trapped by their need to emulate the past, just as Kylo is.

Now, a lot of people have complained about the destruction of the Republic capital and the Hosnian system being visible across space from Takodana. It’s true that this is a trope Abrams has used before, in Star Trek when he showed Spock Prime seeing Vulcan’s destruction from the surface of Delta Vega. I always took that as symbolic, but it’s more literal here. Still, I’m not too bothered. It’s no worse than the question of how the Falcon got from Hoth to Bespin without a hyperdrive in The Empire Strikes Back. I’ve seen it theorized that maybe Hoth and Bespin were in the same star system, or maybe around the two stars in a close binary, say. A similar explanation could work here. Maybe “the Hosnian system” is a term like “the Jovian system” for Jupiter and its moons. And maybe Takodana is in the same star system and wasn’t targeted because it’s neutral. Anyway, Star Wars has always been space fantasy rather than science fiction (in Lucas’s own words), so it’s never really tried to be plausible. It’s an annoyance, but a minor one.

The bigger problem with the destruction of the Republic capital is that it’s so cursory. There were going to be scenes of Maisie Richardson-Sellers as Leia’s envoy to the Republic, someone we’d know and have some reason to care about when the planet was destroyed, but her appearance was reduced to a brief shot without dialogue as she saw the beam coming in. And since we never really see the Republic as an actual factor in the story, and since none of the characters have any personal connection there that we know of, its destruction hardly seems relevant. Still, getting to see the people on the surface at all is an improvement on the destruction of Alderaan. And so is the visual effect. I’ve always hated that the destruction of Alderaan was represented by a quick, instantaneous “poof,” a jump cut from a shot of the planet to the same kind of liquid-fuel explosion used for spaceships blowing up. I always felt it should be more like the effect of the wave-motion gun in Star Blazers or the destruction of the Genesis Planet in The Search for Spock — a slow, roiling upheaval that took time to build to a full eruption because of the vastness of the thing being destroyed. And we finally got that here, both with Hosnian Prime and at the end with Starkiller Base. So I appreciate that, at least. If it had to be a replay of something we’ve already seen, at least they handled the details better this time. (Although, no, we didn’t need another scene of X-Wings in a trench. That was just self-indulgent.)

Let’s see, what else… I like the way the climactic fight made it look as though Finn was the hero who’d save the damsel in distress from the bad man, and then turned it around and had Rey turn out to be the hero. I personally didn’t need that point made, I’ve seen (and written) plenty of female action heroes, but maybe it’s a statement that was necessary for a large part of the action movie audience. And it’s a trick Abrams has pulled before, in the climax of Mission: Impossible III. Although it goes farther here, since it’s not a temporary role reversal, it’s the emergence of the trilogy’s true hero.

See, this is why I don’t get the “Mary Sue” claims. A Mary Sue would overshadow everyone else from the start. Rey has a learning curve, and the fact that she’s the real hero of the story doesn’t become evident until the third act. Everyone treats her like the traditional damsel — Finn holding her hand, Ren kidnapping her and strapping her into bondage — and she subverts the role as much as Leia did in 1977, but this is the version of Star Wars where Leia turns out to be the hero and Luke ends up half-dead. (Okay, yes, Rey was coded as the Luke surrogate from the start by being on a desert planet and connecting with the cute droid. But no analogy is perfect.)

The resolution of the search for Luke is too sudden — R2 had the info all along, he was just taking a really long nap? And he woke up for no clear reason (although at first I thought it was in response to Chewie’s grief). I’ve read that he just woke up slowly after overhearing C3PO talk about the map, but they could’ve hinted at that by showing a standby light start to blink on R2 at the end of that scene, or something. Honestly, of all the returning characters (discounting the cameos of Ackbar and Nien Nunb), 3PO and R2 are the ones the story could’ve most easily done without. I didn’t feel their brief appearances really added all that much. Though R2 at least got to be a Macguffin of sorts again, even if he was a Macguffin nobody knew they should be after. (Which, if you think about it, is probably the best position to be in if you’re a Macguffin.)

You know… while a lot of what George Lucas has said about the franchise recently has been pretty ridiculous, he has a point about how he always tried to feature new and different planetary environments rather than rehashing old ones. Here, aside from the Tatooine-like desert planet, most of the worlds were forested and hard to tell apart. The only thing that set Starkiller Base apart from Takodana or the Resistance base planet was that it was snowing. It wasn’t as visually interesting as the mix of worlds we got in the OT and the prequels. (And when we did get a forest moon in ROTJ, it was a stunningly massive redwood forest. It was the ultimate forest, just as Tatooine was the ultimate desert and Hoth was the ultimate ice world. The worlds here looked kinda like Planet Vancouver.)

Still, I’ve never understood fandom’s criticisms of Abrams as a director. I’ve said how much I like his emphasis on character and emotion, and I think he’s a good director stylistically as well. In fact, I felt this didn’t seem to have enough of his usual style and sensibility, as if he were trying to conform more to the Star Wars house style. I would’ve liked it to have even more of an Abramsy feel.

Or maybe it’s just that John Williams was doing the score instead of Michael Giacchino. I have to say, I didn’t find any of the new musical themes to stand out as much as the old ones. Maybe it’s just that I don’t have the new themes burned in my mind from years of listening to the soundtrack albums as a kid, but the score felt underwhelming except when it quoted the greatest hits. And I was disappointed that the end titles didn’t conclude with the main theme reprise like they did in the OT. That’s as important a musical bookend as the opening theme. (But then, I was the only one who bothered to stick around to the very end of the credits.)

Speaking of which — the coolest thing in the credits was learning that a lot of the background voices were done by cast members from The Clone Wars, including showrunner Dave Filoni, sound editor Matthew Wood (Grievous/droids), Dee Bradley Baker (the clones), Tom Kane (narrator/Yoda), Matt Lanter (Anakin), Cat Taber (Padme), James Arnold Taylor (Obi-Wan), and Sam Witwer (Darth Maul, and now Palpatine on Rebels). Since Rey’s Force vision included a voiceover by Ewan McGregor and archive audio of Sir Alec Guiness, that means all three Obi-Wan actors’ voices are heard in this movie.

I guess that’s enough for now. This has been really long. Question: Is it worth seeing this again in 3D?