Gojira

(1954)
Back before Toho crapped up the legacy of the King of the Monsters with nonsense like Mothra, a child (Gadzuki), or villains like the Smog Monster, Godzilla was a very different animal. This is the original film, shot in black and white, but not the bastardized American version with Raymond Burr no, this is the real Japanese version, the way it was intended to be seen. This film was nominated for the Japanese version of an Academy Award for best picture; no real shame that it lost to a film named The Seven Samurai. Gojira tells the initial tale of the awakening of the monster, who does proceed to terrorize Tokyo and destroy huge swathes of the city. But its not really a monster movie or a horror film; Godzilla is awakened by nuclear testing, his body scarred and burned from the blast, and the chief protagonist in the film, Professor Hideto (played by Takashi Shimura, who also starred in The Seven Samurai), argues against destroying the creature so that he may be studied. This Godzilla leaves radioactive traces wherever he walks, and his breath is merely intense heat, so that he melts much of modern Tokyo (or more usually sets it ablaze). Godzilla here is the personification of the nuclear menace that threatened the world in the 1950s, and is more the impending nuclear holocaust brought to vivid life than any dinosaur. Scenes of a burned and battered Tokyo population would have brought to mind those who suffered and died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (complete with radioactive burns); to the audience this was made for, Godzilla is forcing the Japanese to revisit a horror along the lines in the national consciousness of 9/11. Small wonder the movie is so effective. As I watched it, however, I realized that Gojira is not, as you might expect at a glance, similar to Jurassic Park (science gone awry, giant monsters loose in a world they dont belong to), but is in essence a blueprint for what I consider the greatest film ever made: Jaws. Godzilla is a rarely seen force of nature here, like the shark (for the same reason the shark didnt work and the Godzilla suit was too heavy to be easy to film); he appears from the middle of the ocean and devastates a town (though the shark did so only financially). Professor Hideto is most like Matt Hooper, who wants to study the great beast; the diver captain who runs a salvage company is our stand-in for Sheriff Brody; and this movies Quint is the classically Japanese Dr. Serizawa, scarred in the war (much like Quint), who creates a device so hideous that he must destroy all of his scientific notes and kill himself with its first and only deployment so that it may never be used again. Just like in Jaws, though the creature from the deep is terrible, in the end man is the more effective and frightening killing machine. Gojira is simply excellent filmmaking; far from the parody he would become, here the monster is remote, forbidding, and threatening, and the socio-political parallels to nuclear war and mans destructiveness are exceptionally well played. It can be hard to divorce oneself from a craptacular half-century legacy of little singing girls and models being busted up, flying turtles and three-headed robots, aliens from

space and Monster Island; but if you can do so, and see this Gojira through fresh eyes, youll see a far better film than any that followed (and I like Godzilla movies, mostly), a complex and riveting look at man and what he is capable of doing to himself and his environment, an old tale today perhaps, but oddly prescient in 1954. May 17, 2010