Godzilla (1954): Movie Review
“I barely made it out of Nagasaki,” Emiko Yamane, one of the protagonists from the film Godzilla explains to a passenger on a train. You’d think that surviving the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 would be enough, but not to Ishiro Honda director and writer of the movie Godzilla (1954). His protagonists and other characters have to flee from their homes because Godzilla spits out radiation breath that turns into fire, while his massive size makes it easy for him to destroy villages or even wreck cities like Tokyo. So you have to ask yourself the question, was Honda trying to create a ground-breaking new genre of film or did Honda want to create another atomic bomb?
In his film, Ishiro Honda really puts us between a rock and a hard place. Japan is just recovering from World War II and here comes this reptilian looking dinosaur thing from maybe the depths of hell, stomping down all over miniature houses and the fictional island of Odo. Didn’t Godzilla have somewhere else to be? Didn’t he have some fish to eat or some other sea creature prey to catch? Honda doesn’t think so. In fact he shows us this in the first twenty minutes of the film. Godzilla wasn’t so much out to get all of Japan just because he wanted to, as he was trying to survive. See nuclear weapon testing in the ocean was what woke Godzilla from his comfortable slumber. Who likes to be woken up to the sound of explosions and the…
