Godzilla (1954)

"It's getting even closer, It looks like our doom!"

I'd never seen a Godzilla film in my forty-two years until now. Yes, I know: the shame. But all is remedied; our friend Becca has now ensured, for Christmas, that all but the most recent Godzilla and related films will be blogged over the coming months. That isn't to say I won't be blogging any other movies, of course, but expect Tokyo to suffer a lot in future blogs.

I don’t usually blog films on a school night, which is usually reserved for telly. But tonight I get to procrastinate and put off for another day the need to see the final episode of War of the Worlds.

So, Godzilla. It would spawn the most epic film franchise of all time but, in 1954, was just one film, obviously based on King Kong. It’s more than just that though. For one thing, this is a film of the Atomic Age, both thematically and when it was made- and nowhere was more Atomic Age than Japan, the only country ever to have been nuked in war. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see Godzilla, supposedly an old island mythical beast, having been changed and made invulnerable by radioactivity- which, by the rules of Atomic Age science fiction cinema, is magic and can do anything.

This is clearly a post-war society, though; when Godzilla rampages through Tokyo to utterly destroy it in those wonderful set pieces in the centre of the film, we get a reference to characters having to go to shelters “again”, and we also get a widow telling her children that they will soon join their father, the implication being that he died in the war. This is awkward, because on the one hand Imperial Japan was a deeply inhumane place guided by a truly evil ideology which has touched many of us- my Grandad Gordon fought in Burma and told me only the most child-friendly of the atrocities he saw, and it was obvious there were others. Let’s just say he never bought a Japanese car.

The people in Godzilla remember and refer to the war, though, and that’s interesting. Post-war Japan seems so very disconnected from its ugly predecessor but these people lived through it, and accepted the need to abandon aggressive nationalism and cruelty. Certainly, the society we see here is a civilised one- give or take the odd professor acting as an old fashioned patriarch with his daughter’s fiancé.

All this, and the very ‘50s angst about the abuse of nuclear science (with Serizawa’s oxygen destroyer weapon an obvious metaphor for other weapons of mass destruction- note that, before using it, he burns his notes, and his death is a suicide so the knowledge dies with him; I think the film’s stance on nukes is clear) make this feel like more than the straightforward ‘50s monster movie that it is at heart. That’s an interesting combination; a subtext with a film like this.

Fundamentally, though, never mind all that: it’s Godzilla, and he’s destroying Tokyo in awesome set piece scenes with truly excellent model work. The film is brilliantly structured to hold back suspense- Godzilla doesn’t appear until we’re 21 minutes in and he’s been truly built up as a threat. And there’s just enough character melodrama to get us to like the characters without trying to rival the monster as a source of drama.

Films in this genre don’t get much better than this. There’s a reason why this is a classic. But will the follow-ups be as good...?