There is an almost cosmic cruelty to the fact that Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai won Best Film at the Japanese Movie Association awards of 1954 when Gojira (ゴジラ) , for all of its cinematic blunders, spawned an entire sub-genre into the tonkatsu (read: Power Rangers/Super Sentai, Ultraman, 1970's Japanese Spider-Man) genre in the form of the creation of the kaiju (怪獣)... the strange beast.
It is generally accepted that horror as genre only works on an audience that has experienced fear, but also that can see the mirror being reflected in film as both a cautionary tale and a manifestation of those societal anxieties. By the time of its release on November 3, 1954, Japan had already dealt with nuclear holocaust. Not only had it been dealing with that, but also the residual effects of a nation bombarded with Oppenheimer's folly. Gojira (known around the world as Godzilla) is born in this film, a byproduct of writer/director Ishirō Honda's (本多 猪四郎) own brush with the nuclear problem. The introductory scene with the fishing boat being inundated with radiation off the shores of a fishing village is but a theatrical reenactment of reports at the time of fishing boats that were hauling dead fish, or getting sick from the radiation infested waters of the Pacific Theatre.
Something must be lurking in the water...
Whether inspired by the doomsday scenario that beckoned the Japanese during this era (our own Doomsday Clock currently sitting awfully close to midnight), or via the emerging monster films of a particular American variety - this much is clear, Honda created a monster to birth all monsters. King of the Kaiju is a nicknamed levied at Godzilla the character. But it is Gojira, the film in its original non-American edited form, that truly is the King of the Kaiju. The eponymous kaiju, genre progenitor of all titanic rubber keloid monstrosities and miniature city-smashing shenanigans that project, in sometimes questionably humorous fashion, the horrors of the bomb.
The big fat monster, sometimes cross-eyed and lethargic, is the Guinness World Record holder for longest film franchise. Like the cockroaches and Twinkies of legend, he will persist long after humans bomb ourselves to Kingdom Come. Gojira almost ruins his debut, not unlike Jaws in Spielberg's seminal blockbuster: looking off place, not quite there, hazy, like a hallucination to both the audience and the villagers of Odo Island.
"Mankind had created the bomb, and now nature was going to take revenge on mankind" - Tomoyuni Tanaka (田中 友幸) creator of Gojira
The walking bomb, the sentient nuclear tank, a Lovecraftian Metal Gear arising from the depths of the hydrogen wastelands of Bikini Atoll - that is the societal fear that could take hold of the world. That nuclear anxiety, sometimes lightly grazed upon by fans of Honda's genre film, produced works like Pacific Rim, King Kong (depending on the version), Metal Gear Solid, and countless others. But in this film, instead of reverence for the Patron Saint of anti-nuclear art, he is met with hysteria and mania.
The villagers and investigating scientists flee, recouping while planning how to destroy the strange beast that has stomped its crater-forming steps on their once-idyllic rural landscape. The destruction that Godzilla enacts while they scramble for the solution to this natural disaster becomes apocalyptic (even for 1954 standards and cinematography) - the whale-themed villain, terrible and uncontrollable. "Gojira" is a combination of "gorilla" and "jujitsu," the Japanese word for whale. Like the bomb we birthed into this world, he is now an uncontainable force unleashed in Tokyo - the anthropomorphic ghosts of Christmas, past, present and future, an amalgamation of man-made hubris that seeks to destroy the society we have constructed on top of our collective sins.
...Sins like 1998's Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick, a film devoid of any of the nuclear warnings, and done solely as a practical exercise in narcissism to stick a thumb (perhaps even two) up a certain critic's nose.
My entry to the Godzilla mythos came from the 1985 Raymond Burr joint (we'll cover that some other day, today you get my rehash of 2014 and that's the only Easter Egg I'll show), so my nostalgia for the franchise will always tie Disney into the equation. All thanks to the nonsensical Bambi-themed animated short that curiously accompanied the VHS copies of the film.
Kojira is the revenge of nature, told in the most inherently Japanese way (and with 1950s Jurassic Era science scenes to boot!) - but make no mistake SyFy Channel late night nostalgia astronauts, this film is exactly that mood. 1950's cinema, but specifically sci-fi or "genre" pieces, were known to be extra experimental, moreso than even their contemporary counterparts of the art film mentality.
Gojira is a flawed narrative exercise, but one whose sometimes-effective experiments land. The central kaiju, our author's surrogate, stomps a path across the gargantuan task it sets itself to fulfill - to aggrandize, in the gonzoest of fashions, the terrors of nuclear war as cinematic spectacle, for the world to bear witness to the monstrosity of the scariest "strange beast" of them all... the Atomic Bomb.
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