Genre Action

Godzilla 1985 (1985)

Item: Godzilla 1985
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — Godzilla 1985 (1985)

By the mid-1980s, the Godzilla franchise was in a curious position. Toho's long-running series of kaiju films had produced fifteen entries since the original 1954 picture, each one drifting further from the sombre, nuclear-haunted tone of Ishiro Honda's debut and deeper into Saturday-morning monster-wrestling territory. Sensing that something had been lost, Toho made a deliberate decision with The Return of Godzilla (1984) to strip away the accumulated silliness and return the creature to his origins as a genuine symbol of atomic dread. The result, at least in its Japanese form, was a more considered and politically engaged piece of science fiction, arriving during the final years of the Cold War when talk of mutually assured destruction was very much back on the front pages. When New World Pictures acquired the film for North American distribution, however, they took a rather different approach to the material.

What arrived in Western cinemas in 1985 under the title Godzilla 1985 was a substantially reworked cut, running 87 minutes and incorporating newly shot scenes featuring Raymond Burr, who had performed a similar bridging role in the 1956 American re-edit of the original film. Burr, best known to television audiences as Perry Mason, reprised his character of journalist Steve Martin, providing a kind of narrative glue intended to make the Japanese footage more palatable for audiences unfamiliar with the series. The co-direction credit reflects this split production: Koji Hashimoto helmed the original Japanese material for Toho, while R.J. Kizer handled the American inserts for New World Pictures. The arrangement was not unlike the approach used on the 1956 release, making Godzilla 1985 something of a deliberate echo of that earlier localisation strategy. Whether that echo was a clever piece of brand continuity or simply a recycled solution to the same old problem is the kind of question the film itself invites. If you're curious about other Japanese genre cinema from the same era, the blog has looked at The Snow Woman (1968), another piece of Japanese genre filmmaking with a particular atmosphere all its own, and more recently at Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024), which shows how Japanese fantastical storytelling has continued to evolve.

The principal cast of the Japanese footage includes Keiju Kobayashi as the Prime Minister, Ken Tanaka as a journalist caught up in the crisis, and Yasuko Sawaguchi and Shin Takuma in supporting roles. These are polished but unremarkable performances in the context of a genre that has never particularly prioritised its human characters. Burr, for his part, was a figure of genuine weight and presence on screen, the sort of actor whose gravitas can do a great deal of the heavy lifting on its own. Whether that gravitas was well used here is another matter. For a sense of what else was happening in action and science fiction cinema in the same period, it's worth comparing notes with the blog's take on Re-Animator (1985), a film from exactly the same year that took a very different path through genre territory, and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), another 1980s genre piece that wrestled with questions of tone and ambition.

Godzilla 1985 (more accurately known as the Americanized re-edit of The Return of Godzilla (1984)) is a film caught between identities, and it shows. Marketed as a direct sequel to the original 1954 Godzilla (ignoring nearly three decades of Japanese sequels), and awkwardly stitched together with new scenes starring a returning Raymond Burr as journalist Steve Martin, it feels less like a continuation and more like a confused retread. Burr’s involvement gives it a veneer of continuity for Western audiences, but his footage is clearly shot years later, poorly lit, and emotionally disconnected from the rest of the film. Technically, it hasn’t aged well at all. For a movie released in 1985 (a year of Back to the Future, Empire Strikes Back and Cocoon) its effects are underwhelming. The suitmation and miniatures feel clunky even by Toho standards, and while Godzilla’s return to his darker, more destructive roots works thematically, the execution lacks the polish or spectacle you’d expect. By this point, the formula (monster emerges, destroys city, military fails, hero makes last stand) feels repetitive, especially if you’ve seen any of the earlier entries. It does try to recapture the political weight of the original, tackling Cold War tensions and nuclear anxiety, which is commendable. But the pacing drags, the human drama is flat, and the constant shots of screaming crowds and collapsing buildings grow monotonous fast. Watchable for franchise completists or those curious about Godzilla’s evolution, but otherwise a forgettable, dated entry. A missed opportunity to launch a fresh era with real impact. When compared to the films of its time (or even other kaiju movies) it just doesn’t hold up. Not terrible, but not essential. Just… there. Another day, another city leveled.

I think that sums it up rather neatly. There's a version of this film that could have worked, one that leaned fully into the grimmer Japanese cut and trusted Western audiences to meet it halfway, but that version didn't make it to our screens. What we got instead is a film pulling in two directions at once and fully committing to neither. For anyone working through the franchise chronologically, it's a necessary stop, and the attempt to reconnect with the original's political anxieties is at least well-intentioned. But good intentions don't make for good cinema on their own. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say about a film is that it had the pieces and fumbled the assembly. This is one of those.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 1985 | Watched: 2025-10-27

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Trailer

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