Although he’s sometimes played second banana to King Kong in terms of popularity, Godzilla’s one of the greatest large-scale monsters in movie history: The Lizard King boasts 32 films to his credit; the Lengendary MonsterVerse reboot trilogy just climaxed this spring with Godzilla vs. Kong; and the 1954 original film has been enshrined in a Criterion Collection release. Of course a big monster deserves a big screen to swing his tail on, and the Ishiro Honda classic is currently screening with a shiny new 4K restoration at a theater near you.
Ishiro Honda made his mark directing special-effects-driven tokusatsu films and his Godzilla flicks were his towering achievement. The original movie is a showcase for Honda’s imaginative effects-based filmmaking, but it’s also a deeply moving film. While post-war sci-fi and horror movies were generally full of nuclear paranoia, one can't compare the what-if worries of Cold War Americans and Soviets to the actual, horrific losses of the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While most international monster moviegoers love Godzilla films for their silly costumes and bonkers chaotic destruction, Honda’s original Godzilla film was made in the shadow of actual mushroom clouds, and it’s shot-through with a sense of deep national trauma.
In the original, Godzilla is a reptile mutant who achieved his incredible size, strength and special powers from radiation exposure after an atomic bomb test. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the monster's most recent surfacing in the Godzilla vs. Kong epic coincides with the ten-year anniversary of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011? One particularly chilling scene in this first Godzilla film finds government officials and scientists arguing about whether they should make their information about the mutating effects of the nuclear testing public. The scene reads like an eerie echo of the lack of transparency the Japanese government has offered following the disaster in Fukushima.
Honda’s special effects wizard, Eiji Tsuburaya originally conceived of Godzilla as a giant octopus creature. Once the filmmakers decided that a dinosaur-style monster would be a better fit, Tsuburaya was inspired to pioneer the so-called “suitmation” filmmaking techniques, pairing a live performer in an elaborate costume interacting with highly detailed and relatively vast miniaturized sets. The production was so effects-driven that Honda needed 51 days to shoot his cast during principle photography, but required an additional 71 days to lens all of the effects shots.
Godzilla was directly inspired by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), and King Kong (1933) was the movie that inspired Eiji Tsuburaya to become a filmmaker. Godzilla’s plot is practically a straight copy of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which saw an atomic bomb test awaken an ancient dinosaur from its hibernation in the Arctic Circle before the creature swims to Manhattan, unleashing havoc in the Big Apple. That said, Tuburaya’s monster is a more unique creation than The Beast, and Honda’s movie dispensed with the lighter tones of its inspirations, purposefully creating a much darker film that would play on the real life anxieties peculiar to postwar Japan.
Without giving away too many spoilers, Godzilla is a bad guy in this first installment and – while this is a monster movie – it's also a thoughtful meditation on the insanity of nuclear proliferation wrapped in a brooding drama that's full of palpable grief and loss. We still care about this movie because it's one of those rare treasures of the genre: a monster flick that's full of humanity.
