Seventy years on, why Godzilla is the darkest monster movie of them all

Ishirō Honda’s monumental 1954 monster film was born out of Japan’s national tragedy. It contains a dark message for humanity that goes beyond the spectacle of a movie.

For some, Godzilla is the pink-finned superhero teaming up with this year’s ax-wielding King Kong. Godzilla x Kong: New Empire. Some of you may remember him as the kindly guardian angel with laser beam eyes and cute nephew named Godzooky from the 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. However, it started life as a completely different beast. When Godzilla first rose from the boiling seas in 1954, it was the merciless embodiment of nuclear holocaust in Japanese cinema, and 70 years later it remains one of the darkest and most gruesome monster movies ever made. There is.

To commemorate this anniversary, Alex Davidson has curated a season. monster The movie (a Japanese giant monster movie) was shown at London’s Barbican Center earlier this year. “The first movie I saw was 1966’s “Terror of the Deep,” in which Godzilla fights a giant shrimp,” Davidson told the BBC. “I really loved it, but the version I saw on Channel 4 in the 1990s was terrible. [English language] And Godzilla is presented as this very benevolent, already existing creature. It’s a very fun movie, but it’s not necessarily the most serious movie in the world. The following year, Channel 4 aired the first Godzilla in its original Japanese, and I was shocked to see such a beautiful, haunting, and dark film. ”

According to monster lore, Godzilla is a prehistoric monster, but most fans would agree that Godzilla was born in August 1945. US atomic bombs exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanmore than 150,000 people died. “It’s important to remember that Japan is the only country on earth to have been directly affected by the atomic bomb,” leading monster scientist Stephen Sloss told the BBC. “That’s why ‘Godzilla’ is a movie that could only have been made in Japan in terms of its exploration content.”

The atomic bomb had a “huge impact on the Japanese national psyche,” Sloss added. However, the last Japanese citizens to die from the atomic bomb were not those from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In March 1954, a tuna fishing boat named Daigo Fukuryu Maru, or Lucky Dragon Five, was contaminated by fallout. US thermonuclear test at Bikini Atoll In the Pacific Ocean. The crew’s radio operator died from radiation poisoning, and the Japanese government discovered that irradiated tuna was being sold throughout Japan. Dr. Geoffrey Angles, a professor at Western Michigan University, discussed this issue at a seminar sponsored by the Barbican and the Nippon Foundation of London. “It became very clear to the Japanese people that no matter what they did, the radiation produced by forces outside Japan would come back to visit them in their homeland.”

Taking inspiration from two recent movie hits, Toho Studio producer Tomoyuki Tanaka came up with the idea to combine real-life horror with oversized monsters. King Kong (1933) was reprinted in 1952, and a new film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, about dinosaurs rampaging through modern-day New York, was released in 1953. Tanaka hired prolific science fiction novelist Shigeru Kayama. I will write a treatment for the so-called “Project G”. “He really thought [it] “As an anti-nuclear project,” says Dr. Angles, who translated Kayama’s novel version into English.

The rest of the crew, including director and co-screenwriter Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya, who oversaw design and visual effects, approached the film with just as much seriousness. Almost unbelievably, Godzilla arrived in movie theaters just eight months after the Five Lucky Dragon Incident. And to prove that this movie is heavier than your average monster movie, it opens with a scene that reenacts that traumatic event.

The story is about Godzilla (or godzillaTo use its more precise Japanese name, it is a tyrannosaurus-like dinosaur, a type of species that has been mostly hidden in the ocean for the past several thousand years. “When they can’t find fish in the sea, they come to land and prey on humans,” says an elder from a village on the island where they are occasionally seen. However, it was destroyed by an atomic bomb test, mutated into the nearly indestructible Leviathan, and given “radioactive breath.” Naturally, they also sulked at it. Godzilla soon lays waste to Tokyo, swinging his tail and destroying buildings and setting the city ablaze.

The filmmakers wanted to emulate the exquisite stop-motion animation that Willis H. O’Brien created for King Kong, but Tsuburaya didn’t have the necessary time or budget, so will be played by Haruo Nakajima, who wears a rubber suit. It has stubby legs and a wobbly dorsal fin. He slowly wanders through a miniature model city, with only a few snippets of animation and puppetry, but the scenes of monsters overrunning the Japanese capital are still horrifyingly effective, and the New York equivalent of King Kong. Much more upsetting than the scene.

Honda was held as a prisoner of war in China in 1945, and on his way home he saw the ruins of Hiroshima firsthand. He was determined to recreate the apocalyptic massacre and subsequent smoking devastation that many Japanese remembered in 1945, not only in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also in Tokyo, which had been ravaged by U.S. air raids. . “Many people who went to the theater to see the movie [Godzilla] Dr. Angles said, “This film provided a way for people to connect and re-feel old traumas that still linger from World War II.”

A key element is the attention the film gives to the monster’s innocent victims. In the most harrowing scene, a mother cradles her children as they crouch on the street. “You’ll see your father soon,” she says. “We will join him in heaven.” Moments later, somber scenes of overcrowded hospitals, hallways lined with people carrying stretchers, bloody corpses, and crying infants are depicted in documentary-like naturalism. drawn. A doctor holds a Geiger counter over a girl and shakes her head as she hears the device crackle. There’s no hope.

“Original movies are very special,” Sloss says. “Compare that to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” as both feature highly radioactive prehistoric reptilian monsters, both are shot in black and white, and in a 4:3 ratio. The similarities are only superficial.” The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was made for a Saturday matinee audience: children and teenagers. However, the scenes of long suffering in Godzilla are not sad. painful. ”

The film also has a depth that goes beyond most monster movies. One of the main characters is Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura, co-star of Kurosawa’s classic films such as “Rashomon” and “Rashomon”). seven samurai), a paleontologist sitting in the dark is shown dismayed at the prospect of such a miraculous “biophysical specimen” being killed without being studied. Another character is Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), a rogue scientist with an eyepatch who has synthesized a substance he calls an “oxygen destroyer.” This substance can turn marine life into skeletons within seconds when placed in water. Serizawa knows it is effective against Godzilla as well, but fears that if the government gets its hands on the compound, the substance could be weaponized and cause even more harm.

Godzilla isn’t just an epic blockbuster, that’s for sure, but it’s a fable about terrifying dilemmas. That is, should we allow the development of increasingly powerful weapons, knowing that this escalation will result in ever more casualties?In the end, Serizawa uses the Oxygen Destroyer He is persuaded to do so, but he burns the note beforehand and then commits suicide while sad music plays. “We’re not encouraged to say, ‘Hooray, this saves the day,'” Davidson said. “The Oxygen Destroyer is not as evil as Godzilla, but it is still a last resort,” the filmmakers quipped, as reporters chanted “Dr. Serizawa’s great victory.” But Godzilla’s defeat is far from the triumph we see in Hollywood movies, given the dark sacrifices it makes.

“This is not a victory at all,” Sloss says. “The threat of Pandora’s box being opened persists. In some ways, the end of Godzilla is similar to the end of Christopher Nolan.” oppenheimerOppenheimer said to Einstein, “I was worried that we would start a chain reaction that would destroy the whole world…I believe so.” The message is that the arms race is never ending, there is always a bigger threat around the corner, and we are always facing our own destruction, and it will be at our own hands.” Dr. Yamane elaborates on this warning. The last words of the movie are, “I don’t think that was the only Godzilla. If they continue experimenting with deadly weapons, another Godzilla may appear somewhere in the world.”

Sure enough, a sequel was released just five months later and has been in production ever since. There have been 33 Japanese Godzilla movies to date, but it’s safe to say that none are as important as the 1954 original. , both Sloss and Davidson stress that they are all worth seeing in their own right. “This series is more knowledgeable and more playful,” Davidson says. “But it’s very inventive. Even in weaker films, for example, where there are giant cockroaches walking around and that at least looks ridiculous, they are interesting and different. We are taking bold risks.”

Sloss believes that Japan’s Godzilla series is “one of the most tonally rich series in the history of popular cinema,” while Godzilla himself is “a very allegorically fluid character. ”, which was created to comment on nuclear weapons, but later came to represent nuclear weapons. “Pollution, climate change, and fighting back against rampant consumerism and capitalism.” It’s hard to say what Godzilla will represent in recent Hollywood blockbusters, but his latest Japanese film Shin Godzilla (2016) and godzilla minus one (2023) – which won an Oscar for its special effects – is the closest to the tone of the original. Or maybe, as Sloss suggests, Oppenheimer is the true spiritual sequel to the first film. When Godzilla wreaks havoc on Tokyo, viewers may be reminded of Oppenheimer’s quote from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita. “Now I become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”