Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

Item: Godzilla Raids Again
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

There's a version of this review where I'm generous about Godzilla Raids Again and talk up its place in history, its scrappy energy, its sheer nerve in following up one of the most genuinely unsettling monster films ever made. And I'll get to all of that. But let's be honest first: as a film, as a piece of storytelling you'd actually want to sit with, it's a bit of a mess.

The setup is simple enough. Two pilots crash-land on a remote island and stumble into a brawl between Godzilla and a new creature, the spiky, aggressive Anguirus. They barely get out alive, report back to the authorities, and then watch helplessly as the fight follows them home to the Japanese mainland. Cities burn, the military scrambles, and eventually Godzilla is defeated by being buried under an avalanche of ice. Yes, really. That's the ending. And honestly, that sums up the film's relationship with its own ideas: there's something there, but it gets smothered before it can breathe.

What made the original 1954 Godzilla so powerful was that it meant something. You felt the weight of it, the grief, the very specific trauma of a country still reckoning with nuclear destruction. This one trades all of that for spectacle and speed. The pacing is frenetic in a way that doesn't feel exciting so much as hurried, like the production needed to get something out the door quickly. The human characters are flat, the drama between scenes of monster action is forgettable, and the suitmation, which was always a practical craft with its own charm, looks noticeably stiff here, even measured against the standards of the era.

And yet. I can't quite dismiss it, because without Godzilla Raids Again, none of the good stuff happens. This is the film that invented monster versus monster. Anguirus throwing himself at Godzilla, teeth and claws and sheer stubborn aggression, is the blueprint for decades of kaiju battles to come. Every time Ghidorah descends from the sky, every time Mechagodzilla squares up, every time I've had a brilliant time watching Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964), that lineage runs back through this film. It's the awkward, undercooked origin of a tradition that would produce some genuinely wonderful cinema. You can't write it off entirely.

What you can do is be clear-eyed about its faults. The monster fights are short and chaotic in a way that reads as clumsy rather than kinetic. The human storyline about the two pilots and their romantic entanglements exists mostly to fill time between the destruction. And the infamous American re-edit, released as Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959), managed to make everything worse by renaming Godzilla, adding clunky narration, and draining whatever atmosphere remained. I'd always recommend watching the original Japanese version if you're going to watch it at all, but even then, you're not in for a comfortable ride.

For franchise completists, it's essential. There's no getting around that. If you're making your way through the Toho library, you watch this one, you note its significance, and you move on. It's a stepping stone, a rough and imperfect one, but a necessary part of the journey. The science fiction cinema of the 1950s was full of films doing interesting things with fear and spectacle, and the original Godzilla sits comfortably among the best of them. This sequel doesn't. It's more B-movie romp than meaningful continuation, and it wears that limitation openly.

Two and a half stars. Decent as an early kaiju curiosity, historically indispensable, cinematically rough. I'm glad it exists, mostly because of what it made possible rather than what it actually is. Sometimes a film's greatest achievement is the door it opens for everything that comes after it. This is very much one of those films.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 1955 | Watched: 2025-10-29

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store
Buy: Apple TV Store
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · Criterion Channel · Cinemax Amazon Channel · HBO Max
Rent: Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Buy: Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

Read more

American Beauty (1999)

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

The Babadook (2014)

The Peanuts Movie (2015)

The films worth your time, once a week.