GOJIRA REVIEW

    "Godzilla was baptized in the fire of the H-Bomb and survived."

           Gojira has always been a difficult film of me to review. It isn't particularly enjoyable to sit through, it is overly dark (not tonally but ascetically), and it isn't a great origin story for what the series will become. It is however a very important film both for Japanese culture and the Godzilla franchise itself. Godzilla was created almost as a way of coping with what happened less than a decade before with the Unites States bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At one point a woman on a trolley says she can't believe this is happening again as she barely made it out of Nagasaki. This is a cautionary tale to the Japanese people, as their own H-Bomb testing is what supposedly led to the waking up and mutation of Godzilla. They never directly mention the United States and even go so far as to say that placing blame over the creation of Godzilla will only upset foreign diplomacy. It is a message movie, but it doesn't ram it down your throat. It is a film made for the Japanese people, meant to offer a fantasy depiction of the nuclear destruction they had just experienced while offering a message of hope for the future.

        The human characters don't have too much to do but sit and wait for Godzilla to arrive. Professor Yamane wants to study Godzilla. His daughter Emiko is caught in a love triangle with Ogata and the Dr. Frankenstein-esque Dr. Serizawa who has accidentally created a device called the oxygen destroyer. Serizawa demonstrates this device to Emiko off camera, where we see her react in horror at what it can do. Only later in a flashback do we see that, when dropped into a fishtanks the oxygen destroyer immediately turns all the fish to bones. This becomes the weapon that can be used to kill Godzilla with Serizawa sacrificing his life to deliver it.

       The rest of the film is filled with Godzilla attacking. Some shipping vessels are destroyed at the beginning and later Godzilla comes to land destroying houses, trains, and eventually Tokyo Tower, These scenes are portrayed like a war documentary with lots of stock footage of the Japanese coast guard.  There is some excellent model work and Godzilla himself looks better as a rubber suit than he would have in stop motion. This film would go on to later influence American films like Jaws, Jurassic Park, and certainly Godzilla (1998) and Godzilla (2014). The touch of finding the fossil in the footprint was nice, though an aerial shot of them standing in the footprint would have been fantastic. It's interesting how similar the footprint scene in Godzilla (1998) is to this original.

Godzilla's first reveal is a spectacle. The monster appears over the ridge and the people's reactions are spot on. First they run away from it, but the second it disappears behind the ridge again, they run back towards it to get another look. Godzilla's scale is convincing and the effects though severely dated must have impressed at the time. The film doesn't have blockbuster pacing, which is why it seems to play like more of a documentary than anything, but Godzilla's scenes do have the same momentum of other films in the series. This is the most serious and downbeat film in the franchise, without any glorification of the destruction or monster itself.

        Finally, the music is unquestioningly perfect. Akira Ifukube's score is brilliant, and it is interesting that Godzilla's theme is used for the military in this film more than for Godzilla himself. Though Godzilla is destroyed, one of the final spoken lines is “But if we keep on conducting nuclear tests, it's possible that another Godzilla might appear...” This paves the way for a possible sequel and as we know there's been more than one. This film was re-cut two years later for American audiences and entitled Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and has added footage of American Actor Raymond Burr. It is a very different film and deserves to be reviewed on its own. Overall Gojira is extremely hard to rate by today's standards, but its relevance to the Godzilla series and this blog is so immense that it must be awarded the highest of honors in the Godzilla canon. 10/10

COMING SOON: Review of Godzilla: King of the Monsters