Note: My friend Allen recently posted a podcast on Hollywood Hollow, in which I, along with two other friends, discuss South Korean directors like Park Chan-Wook (Sympathy for Mr. Vengance), Bong Joon-Ho (The Host), and Kim Ji-Woon (A Tale of Two Sisters). You can listen to it HERE .
Gojira offers up a radioactive threat that decimates cities, tears families apart, and leads scientists and citizens to consider the worst of worst-case-scenarios. At the end, when an old man contemplates the supposed destruction of the fire-breathing leviathan, he worries that more disasters may be on the way, and the resignation in his voice feels far too real. To watch this film is to see artists struggle to encapsulate a tragedy through a monstrous proxy. Gojira plays like national therapy.
Omens dominate the film’s opening scenes, as people find evidence of the emerging threat. Offshore wrecks indicate something formidable, and enormous footprints don’t exactly reassure. Eventually, the dinosaur (an irradiated mutant descendant of, go figure, Godzillasaurus) rolls through Tokyo like a walking warhead, knocking buildings to the ground, leaving an atomic signature in his prehistoric wake. People line the halls of hospitals, some suffering from radiation sickness. A mother promises her children that they’ll see their father again. And then there’s Doctor Serizawa.
Ably played by Akihiko Hirata, Serizawa holds the means to destroying Godzilla (a submersible de-oxygenator), but he deeply fears the weapon falling into the wrong hands. Offered the opportunity to save his country, Serizawa does the noble thing: he destroys all his research. His perspective and actions read like a response to Japan's nuclear destruction, as he absolutely refuses the idea of disclosing his research, fearing the idea of the state weaponizing such a destructive weapon. Indeed, his fury at the government proves so strong that he ventures underwater to personally vaporize Godzilla and cuts off his air. No one will know. No one should know.
The discordance between scenes with these earnest ideas and scenes with the man-in-suit dinosaur prove abrasive. The filmmakers no doubt lacked the budget for more impressive special effects; they were inspired by Harryhausen’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, but they fail to duplicate that film’s impressive stop-motion effects. Although, in a way, we should be grateful Gojira is complete at all. The film was purportedly cobbled together by Toho after they jettisoned a completely different project and had a brief window (paging Doctor Corman).
That explains Godzilla’s floppy back-plates, and the cheesy miniatures, and I admit that one of the pleasures of the film is how, as a result, we’re not shown the monster straightaway, but allowed to consider its size and danger via secondhand evidence. That decision allows interest to build, and, while the absence makes Godzilla’s rubber bumbling disappointing, no one (not even I) can argue his now-iconic status. The irony is that later films would ditch this film's fascinating undercurrents and, in doing so, transform Godzilla into one of the most recognizable monsters in movie history.
RATING: B-
NOTE: Gojira is now available on Netflix Instant Watch.
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