GODZILLA (1954) Remains a Kaiju Classic for Good Reason
A review of Ishirō Honda’s original genre-defining monster movie.
“Godzilla was baptised in the fire of the H-bomb, and survived. What could kill it now?”
Ahead of eventually watching the widely acclaimed Godzilla Minus One, and in light of the shameful fact that up ’til this point I had only ever seen the 1998 and 2014 American Godzilla remakes from Roland Emmerich and Gareth Edwards respectively, I figured it was about time I finally got around to acclimating myself to the franchise’s roots by going back to the very beginning, and properly seeing Ishirō Honda’s 1954 original Godzilla at long last.
It took me 30 years to get here, but I think I had to go the long way round through life to reach this specific moment in time, where I am old enough to better comprehend the scale and horrifying gravity of the evil inflicted against Japan by America’s nuclear bombings, particularly in our freshly post-Oppenheimer world reminding us of the mortal and existential threat posed by the creation, proliferation, and hoarding of nukes by numerous nations locked in the death spiral of their paranoiac zero sum game of mutually assured destruction. With all of that in the back of my mind, plus the historically contextual knowledge that this Godzilla is unquestionably hugely informed by it having been released only 9 years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the latter of which is explicitly alluded to by name in the film), altogether made the film hit harder for me now than it would’ve done if I’d first seen it as a child or a teen, who’d dismissively discount it as just some silly, dated, man-in-a-rubber-suit monster movie.
The imagery conjured by Godzilla’s warpath of apocalyptic destruction is not only redolent of those infamous old film reels of atomic bomb blasts obliterating empty test houses with fearsome shock waves of irradiated fire, but is also eerily pre-reminiscent of disasters that wouldn’t happen for decades to come. Like the scene where they try electrocuting Godzilla by surging the power lines, and the humans are doing so within a room that looks a lot like the control room from the Chernobyl nuclear plant, while wearing outfits that resemble what the Chernobyl plant workers wore when they accidentally unleashed an intangible monster of radioactive death upon the world. Or that one moment during Godzilla’s attack on the heart of Tokyo, where a shot of the jagged and smoking remains of one demolished building looks unnervingly similar to what the burning remnants of the World Trade Centre towers would look like almost half a century later, “all twisted metal stretching upwards” (to quote Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s ‘The Dead Flag Blues’).
The film’s sombre tone takes its premise deadly seriously, painstakingly caring to depict how a post-war Japan, still freshly reeling from the longterm traumas of the A-bombs’ aftermath, might realistically react to the threat of a Lovecraftian monster from the vast, dark, literally unfathomable depths of the ocean, disturbed from its ancient slumber by mankind’s warmongering scientific innovations, being set free to destroy whatever gets in its way. From the radio and television newscasts of distraught victims and refugees crowded in makeshift hospitals, to the choir of children hauntingly singing a song of tribute and despair for the deceased, all the way through to the complex, unwinnable moral quandaries presented by the solution to stopping this unstoppable monster, via the film’s very own Oppenheimer-type figure distraught by the potential world-ending applications of his own invention, all makes the OG Godzilla not just a genre-defining monster movie classic, but an invaluably essential time capsule that stunningly bottles some of the raw emotion of what it felt like to live in that post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki era.
Originally published December 22nd 2023 at https://jackandersonkeane.substack.com.
