Mosura 3: Kingu Gidora raishu

This movie is the third and last film of the Mothra trilogy. It concerns King Ghidorah invading earth and stealing children. Mothra comes to fight King Ghidorah and three battles ensue: one in the forest, one in the Cretaceous period, and one in the forest again. In the end, Mothra and the power of good prevail against King Ghidorah and the power of evil.

Now there are quite a few improvements and good points about this film. King Ghidorah is an awesome monster, much more impressive than the 1991 version, Death Ghidorah, and Dagahra. Mothra is impressive too. The city destructions scenes are quite exciting and fun to watch. The monster battle scenes were able to recapture much of the intensity that the Godzilla movies had but the first two Mothras lacked. Though the film is still directed at children, the main character is a bit older and not as annoying as the kids from the previous entries were.

Now, there are some aspects that really detracted from the film. The city destruction scenes, while exciting, are way too short. The previous two Mothra films had monster fights that nearly took up the entire middle portion of the film whereas this movie had one short one, one medium-sized one, and (following in tradition of the other two) a short final battle. The musical talents of Akira Ifukube are lacking as well. I also thought that the Prehistoric Mothra scene was quite contrived.

Overall, it's a fun movie to watch but still doesn't live up to the level of Godzilla. However, it's still good to see King Ghidorah looking as magnificent as ever.

The last of the three Rebirth of Mothra series is a really fine entry. Hopefully, the producers of this series will bring back more adventures of our flying Moth that saves the planet. In this film, the science behind can be a little to complicated for non-physics professors. King Ghidora kidnaps children and places them in a large egg-like prison. The three fairies "Moll, Lora and Belvera" return. Mothra is badly defeated by King Ghidora but there is one hope, to send Mothra back in time 130 million years to battle King Ghidora when he was younger and weaker. Mothra realizes that he cannot return and will die in the past. Moll sends him back but the power needed to do it kills Moll. Lora and Belvera are both trapped in the egg-like prison. The Moth finally is able to defeat King Ghidora in the past but mistakenly cuts off a piece of tail that will grow into another King Ghidora in the future. Mothra dies in the past but two dinosaur Mothra's put him in a time capsule of silk web. Both creatures make a new appearance in the future. This time the Moth has become an armor plated Moth. Can King Ghidora battle a tank plated Moth? Will the fairies remain two or return to three? Why would a creature want children? Excellent fight scenes and action. A must see battle of Moth vs Three-headed creature!

Right, third Mothra movie in 3 years (1996, 1997 and 1998). It started out alright, but then just got more and more stupid actually.

I am glad to see that the 1998 movie didn't do what the 1997 movie did off of the 1996 movie, which was a blatant copy and paste job. At least the writer, Masumi Suetani, went for a whole new direction with "Mosura 3: Kingu Gidora raishu" (aka "Rebirth of Mothra 3"). So that was good.

But that is where I have to stop for a moment and comment on that different approach, which wasn't all so good after all. In this third movie, Mothra travels back in time to stop King Gidorah. Yeah, time travels. You didn't read that wrong. That was a bit too odd for my liking. Sure, it was original thinking and out-of-the-box. But time travel? Come on...

The movie does have the same level of special effects as the previous two movies, for better or worse. The effects are good enough for the movie, though they bear witness to being aged by today's standards. And you shouldn't be expecting to be blown away by an array of dazzling effects. However, I will say that they upped their game with the appearance of Mothra in this 1998 movie. So that was cool.

And while we are on the special effects; odd how they managed to obtain a good level of effects on Mothra and Gidorah, but the dinosaur effects were just downright laughable and nowhere near being realistic enough to pass as being believable.

The acting in the movie was adequate. Well, you know what you are getting yourself into here with this Kaiju movies. And for some reason the Mothra movies always have children as the main protagonists. And that was also the case in the 1998 "Rebirth of Mothra 3" movie.

"Rebirth of Mothra 3" was enjoyable and entertaining for sure. I just personally wasn't a fan of the time traveling aspect. My rating of this 1998 addition to the Mothra legacy lands on a very mediocre five out of ten stars.

Like "The Terminator" in reverse, Mothra travels back in time to preemptively defeat a younger version of Godzilla's greatest foe, the evil three-headed King Ghidora, who we learn from Mothra's two diminutive priestesses that he's responsible for killing all of the dinosaurs and is now planning on killing the children of the world. So Mothra heads back in time to the "Land of the Lost" for kaiju-style fighting to stop Ghidora in a dinosaur-filled landscape. If you enjoy rubber-suited men pounding on each other on miniature sets, you'll very much enjoy this Mothra picture. It's nothing all the special, but for this type of film the special effects are solid, the story is serviceable, and and there was plenty of giant-monster-action. Here's to hoping Part 4 will revolve around Mothra having to get his parents to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance!

I had bit of a frustration about these '90s Mothra movies. That its special effects could be little more realistic etc. But now I think about it, these movies were kicking a** with bigger and brighter than life cinematography and plot when everything in our world was turning towards darkness (if you think about all the sci-fi, super hero movies that came out in the '90s and how dark they were). Here finally someone had a plot where motivation for destruction was not anger, but force of nature is trying to stop another force of nature from causing catastrophe.

I just think these movies are great because it depicts another world that isn't like ours but brighter and people living in it is brighter too. Topics of Mothra series was more geared towards the world than say like Batman, where it was just about Bruce, his personal issues and few bad guys. Mothra series was talking about things like destruction of nature, and value of our children.

When everything around us was getting darker, it's a real treat to throw these bigger and brighter than life movie up on the screen and just kick back for 90 minutes.