Next year will mark the 70th anniversary of the debut of Godzilla, the now legendary kaiju, who made its first appearance in the 1954 Japanese film that bears its name.
I’m dating myself when I say that my first exposure to Godzilla will have come on WOR Channel 9’s Saturday-morning monster movies, a fixture in the greater New York City metropolitan area in the 1970s and into the 80s, with the appalling Westernized version of that film, reedited to shoehorn in Raymond Burr, WTF, as an American reporter covering the kaiju attack on Japan. I guess it was still too close to the war and the idea was that Americans couldn’t possibly empathize with the Japanese experience, so we needed a white guy to translate for us the horror of *checks notes* a giant irradiated lizard stomping around your city. (It’s sorta horrifying to realize that little me sitting in front of a cathode-ray TV in the mid-late 70s was only 30ish years postwar… and hence closer to WWII, though of course I’d have no memory of it, than I am now to 10-year-old boob-tube-addled me.)
Still, I have vivid memories of being a smart, sensitive kid — and somehow a geek from birth, obviously — riveted to the screen by even the Burr version… and even more vivid memories of, as a grownup in the 1990s, seeing the original Raymond Burr–free version of the film on a big screen at NYC’s Film Forum and being, like, damn, this is cinema. Cuz the authentic 1954 Godzilla is pain personified (socialified?). It is Japan’s collective horror at the war, at the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, made plain and inescapable and, well, monstrous. Like, the giant lizard movie is judging America, and maybe also Japan itself, and this is fair.
And now we have Godzilla Minus One, a reboot of the king of all monsters, and not that long after the reboot that was Shin Godzilla less than half a decade ago. Huge kudos to Japanese film studio Toho for taking Godzilla in multiple directions at once. Because Shin was all “What if Godzilla didn’t make his first appearance until the 2010s?” in an obvious but totally appropriate nod to Japan’s then-recent horrors (hello, 2011’s tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear meltdown). And now Minus One rewinds the big lizard to before the 1954 debut to posit that maybe the giant kaiju showed up to stomp Tokyo in 1945, long before the postwar American occupation even ended in 1952?
What I’m getting at now is that never mind whatever you have been culturally programmed to think is the cheesiness of Godzilla movies: this latest is maybe the closest to the sincere, unironic horrors of 1954 than we’ve seen since. This is the first Godzilla movie that is a period piece, that has the hindsight to look back on what Godzilla might mean to us in retrospect today rather than what it looked like at the time of its creation. And it doesn’t have much to say that is generous about what we’ve brought upon ourselves.
What I’m also saying is that maybe it’s not a coincidence that 2023 has given us both Oppenheimer and Godzilla Minus One. That maybe it’s not a coincidence that generational time is calling for a new reconsideration of nuclear weapons. (Um, for the kids who might not know: Godzilla is a creation of American atomic bombs. To add to American war crimes.) See also Apple TV+’s so-far-brilliant new series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which is not only reconsidering the atomic horrors the United States unleashed on the world but is also asking what responsibility we humans bear toward the kaiju that are our creations.
*big sigh*
The war — the last big war, World War II — has just ended when former kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki: The Secret World of Arrietty, March of the Penguins) returns home to Tokyo… and don’t think that the status of “former kamikaze pilot who actually survived the war” isn’t a thing. I am not deeply steeped in Japanese cinema, and I’m sure homegrown Japanese culture has long been confronting the legacy of how the nation approached World War II, but as a Westerner, I cannot recall an instance of a film asking, softly and compassionately, whether the sacrifice of kamikazes was worth it and whether it was cowardice or wisdom that guided some to avoid suicide. It shocked me, in the best way, to see that here. (Koichi is a gentle soul, and the movie is kind to him.) Amidst this conundrum, Koichi returns to his bombed-out home to find rubble, an orphaned infant, and an angry neighbor in Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe), who most emphatically does not believe that any kamikaze should have avoided his divinely appointed fate (she will come around from that). Profound trauma haunts him, and everyone he encounters. It’s heartbreaking.
There is much bittersweet drama in “reject the past” and “hope for the future” and “build your own family out of the ashes” here before we ever get giant stomping lizard that you kinda forget that we’re waiting for giant stomping lizard. It’s all genuinely lovely how these people find something to live for and build upon amid the ruins and the chaos. And then then Godzilla arrives, in a horrific sequence that appropriately calls to mind nuclear bombing, complete with terrifying mushroom cloud, though this one is called up by kaiju fire breath. And then acclaimed filmmaker and visual FX artist Takashi Yamazaki, who wrote and directed and did the VFX for this flick, just lets Kamiki’s Koichi scream in fear and outrage and grief when he witnesses that kaiju mushroom cloud and the devastation it leaves in its wake.
This is the second new film I’ve seen recently that just lets people scream in outrage and grief in the face of unimaginable disaster, which feels both like an important step in our appreciation of how we approach trauma and a harbinger of cinematic depictions to come. I mean, I want to scream out loud on the regular, and I’ve never even seen a kaiju.
I guess the last thing I’m saying is this: If you’re hoping that this new monster movie might offer some escape from terrible reality, you’re probably not going to find any such comfort here.
more films like this:
• Godzilla (1954) [Prime US | Apple TV US | Max US]
• Shin Godzilla (aka Godzilla Resurgence) [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]
Man i’m excited to see this! Not sure if I’ll make it to a theater or will have to wait until home. Ive loved godzilla since i was a little kid. All monster movies, really. Wheres our new gamera movies?!
I haven’t started the show yet. I always wait until most eps have been released.
I was lucky enough for my first Godzilla exposure to be the original cut, on a big screen. My somewhat-local independent cinema used to do Sunday morning scifi screenings while I was in high school (the cinema is still hanging around, but no more of this sadly), and I caught it there. I was stunned; as you say, the cultural cheesiness programming was completely blown out of the water. I have since scene the Burr re-cut, and been pretty. . . well, disgusted.
anyway, this sounds terrific. I hadn’t heard anything about it before seeing it pop up in showtimes for next week, and I had been pretty dismissive out of the gate. You’re making me reconsider my kneejerk reaction; the premise itself is intriguing. I’ll try to catch it!