Watched: 11/01/2026
Format: HBOmax
Viewing: Not sure
Director: Ishiro Honda
Well, it's Sunday and on Thursday, we're going to see Godzilla Minus Zero. To prepare, we're watching this movie, Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster, and then Godzilla: Minus One. It shall be a mini-Godzilla Gauntlet.
It's been a while since I last watched this one. In fact, I am unclear on when I last saw it. It may have been in the 2010's. Give me some grace, there's a lot of Godzilla I've seen over the past few years.
I love this movie in much the same way I love King Kong. Big ideas brought to the screen without blinking about how insane they are, and leaning into a theme. That said, in Godzilla (aka: Gojira - 1954), the theme is post-war trauma. This is a movie about dealing with what a country went through, and dealing with the cost of destruction and a decision to use the ultimate weapon to make it stop.
Godzilla is not a character in his own movie - he's a force of nature and a reckoning. Yeah, yeah, he's a mix of man-in-suit and hand puppet, but Ishiro Honda and Toho are not afraid to set the world on fire here in a way I'm not sure we'd see again until Shin Godzilla (and then Godzilla Minus One).
Of course the other movies have mass destruction - that's what they do. But this movie literally sets its sprawling metropolis on fire and has Godzilla walking through the flames as children cling to their mothers, who can only comfort them by telling them "we'll be with your father soon". I mean, Christ. Two movies later King Kong is being airlifted to fight Godzilla via balloons - there's a hard turn at Toho after this flick, which is just sad and dark from the first frames.
On a logical level, Godzilla is a sci-fi movies and we're told where he came from - underwater caverns sealed off since the age of the dinosaurs, opened up by the H-Bomb. We get the nuclear angle and some hand-wavy dinosaur science that's off by 145 million years. But who's counting?
Before that, we get the Odo Islanders who know - this is bad juju from the sea, and sacrifices will happen. We explain all we want with science, but at the end of the day, the world we created with war and weapons of war is coming back to bite us. By film's end, what was some folk-dancers is now a chorus being sung across the airwaves praying for peace. What else can you do?
The Godzilla movies have been almost everything over the decades, and some re-boots have ignored everything else except for this movie as they carved out their new path as a direct sequel. But Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One most obviously take their inspiration from this movie, treating Godzilla as a force of nature again, even if they come at it from very different angles.
At the center of the story is the human family of paleontologist Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) who wants to see Godzilla studied and understood. His fetching daughter Emiko (Momoko Kochi) is caught between her supposed betrother - a brooding Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) and a handsome manager of a shipping salvage company, Ogata (Akira Takarada). And Dr. Serizawa's Oppenheimer-like decision to use his weapon.
Anyway, the Raymond Burr version released in the US is... a choice. You can watch it. I'd put this one on instead, any day.
We have two TVs. One’s bigger, in the main living room, and that’s where we watch most movies. (We is older, and subtitles are easier to read on the bigger screen.)
ReplyDeleteOne’s in the basement, and has a much smaller screen... but that's also where the 25-year-old stereo fits best, and those Radio Shack speakers still work great.
When we rewatched this a while back, I told Mrs. James, "you gotta hear the Godzilla roar on the good speakers." So we did. It's right there at the start of the movie.
We watched the rest upstairs, since bigger screen, but... even in 1954 mono, that roar deserves to be heard on the good speakers. It's genuinely friggin' great. That shriek/roar. It's stupendous.