by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Akira Takarada, Momoko Kochi
Intro:
…. an undeniably necessary film on a global scale ….
2024 marks the 70th anniversary of one of the most important sci-fi films ever made. Of course, hindsight is a funny thing, and the film’s reception has gone through numerous stages just in its early years, let alone the following decades.
Initially predicted to be an outright flop, it garnered mixed reactions from local audiences, who saw the film’s monsterification of nuclear holocaust as both exploitative of real-world tragedy, and just plain trashy as visualised through that iconic rubber suit. Opinions started to turn with the help of fresh eyes after its sketchy but (compared to later Americanisations in 1985 and 1998) reasonably faithful 1956 re-cut Godzilla, King of the Monsters.
In regards to the larger cultural narrative of Japan post-World War II, Godzilla and its dinosaur-sized allegory for the damaging effects of then-recent history embodies an attitude that led to both the profound Americanisation of Japanese culture (resulting in the kind of culture shock behind a hefty amount of the weirder forms of media that make it to the West) and the self-flagellated understanding of that history that arguably led them into the present day, eventually delivering the kawaii-shredding reckoning of Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent [lines can be drawn from Godzilla’s personification of immense destruction by this unknowable beast beyond mortal comprehension, to Paranoia Agent’s duelling forces of Maromi and Lil’ Slugger serving as opposing but equal means for Japan as a nation to sleep soundly, believing their hands unstained by the horrors of war].
For a film that spawned a decades-long pedigree for super-sized slobberknockers, it is a profoundly heartfelt depiction of this period in Japanese history. The prolonged discussions about military and bureaucratic responses to the monster may have been served better by being deconstructed in Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, but its clashing stances on the nature of scientific progress and the damage it can wreak hold true even today.
Up until Oppenheimer brought that horrifying reality screaming into the modern era, current generations could be forgiven for seeing nuclear devastation as an abstract threat. But even with the conspicuous edits made to the 1956 cut (which removed the more direct references to nuclear weapons and U.S. involvement in such things), there is no denying how humanely and emphatically anti-nuclear Godzilla truly is.
While the involvement of human characters like Ogata, Emiko, and especially Dr. Serizawa (whose ultimate fate and position within the national narrative was reappraised and recontextualised as the foundation for Godzilla Minus One) adds to that emotional power, it’s still definitively down to Godzilla himself. Wielding early SFX’s two greatest allies (black-and-white camera stock and low-key lighting), special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya plays around with the tricks utilised in the groundbreaking 1933 rendition of King Kong to give a surprising amount of realism to Godzilla’s rampage. It’s easy to see how this one film would spawn an entire industry of special effects driven spectacle (or tokusatsu, in the local tongue), from the melodramatic superheroics of Super Sentai and Kamen Rider to the gore-splattered satire of Yoshihiro Nishimura.
But even with his brutal wrath, the film hits on something that helps explain his more modern anti-hero stance, right up to Godzilla x Kong earlier this year: Godzilla isn’t the villain here. A vengeful force of nature, absolutely, and one that needs to be dealt with, but just as much a victim of humanity’s treatment.
Colourless footage and obfuscating lighting help mask the wonk of the production values (as it did for American and British TV serials of the era), but they also give the footage an immediately melancholic tone, both for the humans caught in the middle and the monster’s own causeless chaos.
Right from the start, Godzilla has been a monster that is terrifying… but also rather pitiable, maybe even sympathetic. In that light, his place metatextually as the embodiment of hubris on the whole of Japan sits a bit easier, seeing that they still took time to (for lack of a better term) humanise the face of that hubris.
Godzilla is an undeniably necessary film on a global scale, but looking at it now with its new 4K restoration (which will hit home media in 2025), the finesse behind its construction is a lot easier to appreciate. Tricks are definitely at play, but the extent to which everything melds together to present a grounded, if extranormal, terror on the big screen is genuinely impressive, whether looking at it as a product of its time or even now in a CGI-saturated film market.
The tangibility of the monster, its path of destruction, and the poor humans left behind still rings true at a time when nuclear power feels like the product of the Before Time. Its use of real-world history, both in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the depiction of irradiated fishing stock (a reference to the Castle Bravo disaster the same year that led to a global re-evaluation of nuclear viability), highlights speculative fiction as an unparalleled vehicle for helping audiences deal with the world’s problems through the veneer of the fantastic.
Within the often-bleak annals of film history, where atrocities like The Black Stork have to be acknowledged, it’s nice knowing that there are films out there that are both fundamentally important and worth watching for their own sake.
