It always amazes me how many Americans think that the 1956 movie Godzilla King of the Monsters was the first Godzilla movie. In my mind, that Raymond Burr movie is not even a Godzilla movie. Godzilla King of the Monsters dices and chops up the 1954 classic Gojira into something that Americans could better handle. What does that mean? In order to understand why Americans had to be spoon fed the story of Gojira, we first need to put the film in context.

The Inspiration

When Gojira came out in 1954, it was based on three primary elements. The first element was a hydrogen bomb test near Japan, by the United States, that did much more damage than expected. The second was the movie Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The idea of a creature rising from the depths of the ocean to destroy modern civilization impacted Gojira producer Tomoyuki Tanaka so much that it was almost used as the model for the first scene in Gojira.

The third and final element that inspired the creation of Gojira was the 1933 classic, King Kong. In the 1950’s, stop-motion action was considered the pinnacle of special effects and the idea of stop-motion, more than the story of Kong, is what inspired Tanaka. But to be fair, Tanaka did want Japan’s own iconic monster movie and he wanted to use the stop-motion technique he had fallen in love with. What Tanaka wound up creating was an entire genre of movies called kaiju movies and he eclipsed anything that King Kong ever accomplished.

The Story

Now that the aesthetic was in place, it was time to deal with the theme. Toho Studios had demanded a completed film from Tanaka and his crew as fast as possible. The studio had greenlit a Tanaka monster movie, but Tanaka had tried several failed ideas that included a monster with a gorilla body and a mushroom-shaped head. Toho had run out of patience and it wanted something to deliver to audiences ASAP.

While traveling in 1953, Tanaka read a story about the hydrogen bomb testing by the United States near the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands. The devastation from the testing killed several Japanese citizens and poisoned the fishing for miles. Tanaka started to piece together a story about the horrors of nuclear weapons testing that featured a monster from the ocean as a representation of the effects of nuclear devastation. Godzilla would become everything that the Japanese still feared, but they were fears that the American people still did not quite understand.

The Monster

Godzilla was going to be a lot of different things before Tanaka decided that his monster would be a cross of three or four dinosaurs and a fire-breathing dragon. The skin on Godzilla is meant to represent the skin conditions that were caused by the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A huge, lumbering, atomic monster that looked like the victims of World War II was everything that Japan did not want to see, but the Japanese could not stay away from the movie. Despite being panned by the critics, Gojira was one of the top grossing movies in Japan for 1954.

This was also the movie that introduced the art of suitmation. Up until Gojira, monsters were either stop-action or smaller creatures that were filmed and then superimposed on the movie. Toho had slashed Tanaka’s budget, so he had to innovate if he wanted to make his monster movie. He could not use the stop-motion method he wanted because it would take too long and was too costly. Out of pure desperation, Tanaka created suitmation and gave Toho a movie-making technique that would bring the studio international fame and success.

The Movie

Gojira forces the Japanese audience to re-live the horrors of World War II. The destruction Godzilla himself creates looks almost identical to the newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the war. Before the film could be shown in the United States, American movie distributors felt that the movie had to be altered to remove the incredible sense of guilt it tries to impose on American audiences. The American distributors brought in a recognizable American actor in Raymond Burr and hacked the movie to pieces. The political angle was lost, but so was the dark effectiveness of the movie as well.

This movie is a brilliant horror film from start to finish. It depicts man’s struggle against himself and the unknown in such a way that you cannot help but feel emotionally depleted by the time it is over. Godzilla’s role as the monster is slowly transformed into the role of what can only be described as a hero. Godzilla’s objective is to punish mankind for its reckless misuse of nuclear weapons, although it still remains unclear as to why Tanaka felt that Japan was the country that needed to be punished.

There is nothing uplifting or inspirational about this movie at all. Even when Dr. Serizawa finds a way to destroy Godzilla, that entire process feels helpless and almost useless. At the end of the movie, we are reminded that mankind could very well create another Godzilla, which feels like the underlying theme of the movie from the very beginning.

Imagine writing and making a movie where you know that you can kill off your main character because the audience almost expects another one to appear. Despite having a shoestring budget and very little to work with when making this movie, Tanaka and his crew wound up creating a movie that is brilliant at several different levels. It is impossible to watch Gojira and not feel some sort of emotional push in some direction. The brilliant thing is that the emotional push can be, and usually is, different for every person.

Gojira has been released and re-released over and over again since it was first screened on November 3, 1954 and it still stands up as relevant and incredibly scary. There are plenty of technical problems with the movie, especially with the monster suit. It is obvious that the actor is unable to get everything out of the suit that he wants and the actor is struggling just to move. But it all seems to fit in with the slow and deliberate destruction that the movie utilizes.

Toho insisted that Gojira be filmed in black and white because, back then, black and white film was cheaper. That financial decision wound up helping to enhance the dark ambiance of Gojira and it also helped Tanaka to get away with some special effects that would have been difficult to pull off in color. In the end, the final product stands as one of the top movies Japan has ever produced and it narrowly lost Japan’s version of the Oscar in 1954 to the legendary movie Seven Samurais, which was directed by world renowned director Akira Kurosawa.

Do yourself a favor and watch Gojira (with English subtitles) at least once. Watch it for the fact that it is the movie that launched one of the most prevalent movie genres ever and for the fact that it is simply one of the best movies ever made.

Rating: 5 out of 5

George N Root III is a movie fanatic and likes the occasional Godzilla movie. Time is running out! Get to the drive-in and see what you have been missing!

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