GOJIRA aka GODZILLA (1954)
Note: Due to an error, the full version of this review did not appear in KAIJUMAX Season 3 #2. Here it is:
Though not by any means the first giant monster movie, Gojira, directed by Ishiro Honda and featuring the monster creations of Eiji Tsuburaya, distinguished itself by moving away from the crisp stop-motion effects of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms from the previous year and instead creating an emotional story not unlike that of 1933’s King Kong, now updated to the atomic age. Using Gojira’s attack as a reflection of the all-too-recent atomic warfare of WWII, as well as a not-subtle reference to the Lucky Dragon no. 5 fishing boat that was caught in the fallout of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, the film captured the paranoia and panic of disasters that humans should have seen coming.
A straightforward disaster-response movie in some respects, Gojira cleverly triangulates its characters around the titular monster: a soft-hearted biologist who wishes to spare Gojira and study him, his haunted colleague, Serizawa, who knows he has the weapon to kill the monster but fears what the governments of the world would do with it if they knew of its existence, Serizawa’s frequently terrified fiancee, a brave salvage fisherman, and, in the English version, an American newspaperman played by Raymond Burr who seems to know a lot of these characters’ body doubles. In a rare feat, the English Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a very different but almost as good counterpart to the classic original. Where Gojira has a great deal of political maneuvering, disaster coverup, musings on what science could make of such a creature, and a maudlin love triangle leading to Dr. Serizawa’s selfless sacrifice, King of the Monsters is more of a voyage of journalistic discovery, ending with a truncated and much more optimistic final scene in which the danger has been permanently eliminated and “the whole world could wake up and live again.”
Besides setting up what was to become one of the longest-running movie franchises of all time, Gojira was the first to make explicit its portrayal of a rampaging creature as representing vague existential threats to humanity (variously: nuclear war, ecological collapse, nature’s fury, etc.), and gave the human characters a darker undertone to what before had been largely a lot of running, screaming, and looking on in bafflement. Though the version westerners saw at the time was simpler and less dark, and let humanity off the hook for all of its war- and ecology-related missteps, it nevertheless gave a deep sense of menace that would continue in the series for about one film before they said “screw it, kids love Godzilla” and made him dance.
Though my tastes in monster movies typically run more to the absurd, Gojira is a undeniably beautiful film, with emotional dialogue scenes, lavishly shot miniatures, deliberate pacing, and an indelible new archetype: a monster who could become cinema’s catch-all metaphor for each decade’s deadliest new global threat.
iamoutofideas
