Ishirō Honda
(Dir.), “Gojira”, Toho Film (Eiga) Co. Ltd., 1954.
“With
a purposeful grimace and a terrible sound
he pulls the spitting high-tension wires
down;
Helpless
people on subway trains
scream ‘My God!’ as he looks in on them;
He
picks up a bus and he throws it back down
as he wades through the buildings t’wards the centre of town.
Oh
no – they say he’s got to go!
Go,
go Godzilla!
Oh
no – there goes Tokyo!
Go, go Godzilla!”
-Blue Öyster Cult, “Godzilla”
I
wanted to go and see the new Gojira film this weekend just passed; however, I
discovered that it had been pushed off the i-Max screen by the “Dark
Phoenix” abomination. Frankly, if you’re going to see a kaiju film,
why would you bother seeing it in small scale? Why would you screen it
in small scale? So, I said “phooey” to that and threw my DVD of the original
film into the player instead.
Monster
movies tend to code for things to do with human society. They tend to be
stories about ‘outsiders’ – those who don’t conform to society’s strictures – or
to be cautionary tales regarding the results of unacceptable behavior. Thus,
werewolves tend to be metaphors for puberty, or unbridled lust, or rage; while
vampires warn against succumbing to seductive strangers or offer salient
warnings about the ramifications of disease. Frankenstein’s monster is a tale
about overreaching and the inevitable tragedy of hubris. On the other
hand, some monsters have little or no sub-text – they just want to get out
there and cause mayhem – I’m thinking of the Thing From Another World, or the
Blob. It’s interesting therefore, that Godzilla covers all the bases.
There
have been over thirty films starring the radioactive dinosaur and most of these
are pretty fluffy. The 2014 American iteration was a mess and the less said
about the Matthew Broderick version, the better. Most of the Japanese movies
were made specifically for children and introduced ‘friendly’ versions of
Gojira, Baby Gojira, and even Jet Jaguar, the size-altering kung fu expert,
who was designed by a child after they won a competition. These have their
moments, but they tend to focus more on the city-trampling than any pesky
narrative considerations.
There
is a tendency to play the maximizing card throughout all of these films although,
arguably, it’s handled better than most American franchises. When Gojira out-guns
all the other big critters on the planet, humans invent a semi-robotic Gojira (Mechagodzilla)
to try and take him out; then aliens find their own big lizard and beef it up
with cybernetic implants to try and gain the upper hand (Gigan). When Gojira
defeats King Ghidora, a cybernetically enhanced version replaces him (Mecha
King Ghidora). And so on, and so on. Each ‘Monster of the Week’ gets replaced
by a more powerful version in a slowly ascending series of gladiatorial bouts.
Anyone out there still wondering where Pokémon came from?
Getting
back to the start of all this mayhem, 1954’s “Gojira!” takes us to
post-World War Two Japan, and a society that is trying to re-build and forget
the recent misadventures of the past. We see a steamboat out on the water with
its crew relaxing in the hot sunlight. Suddenly, a massive submarine explosion disturbs
the water to one side and all hands are running to action stations: they never
make it. The ship is dragged below the waves, the dogged telegraph operators still
morsing as hard as they can. This is an interesting opening in that it directly
parallels a notorious real-life incident that struck a major chord with
Japanese audiences of the day. The “Lucky Dragon 5” incident saw a
Japanese merchant vessel of that name 'accidentally' irradiated by American nuclear
testing in the lead-up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ship and
its entire crew were taken into custody by the testers and their developing
symptoms of radiation exposure monitored for research purposes. All were later
released, with the exception of one radio expert who died after his underlying
liver issues were exacerbated by the radiation. The incident rang loud bells of
alarm for the Japanese public in the last days of the War and those worst fears
were later to come true. The ship is now contained within a museum in Japan.
With
this piece of nuclear history securely in place, let’s now take a look at the Monster
himself. The designers of Gojira wanted him to be like a dinosaur, but also
like a gorilla; a submarine creature, but able to walk on land. The name itself
was a portmanteau of the Japanese words for ‘gorilla’ and ‘whale’ which
kind of lets you know what they were aiming for. Technology of the period only
allowed for the creature to be built as a suit driven by an actor cocooned
within and it took a team of three valiant performers – Katsumi Tezuka, Haruo
Nakajima and Jiro Suzuki - to endure the rigors of bringing him to life. These
guys could barely breathe in the costume and were regularly dragged out of it unconscious,
not to mention being sliced open by loose edges of chicken-wire, or having the
circulation to their limbs cut off. Gojira’s hide was specifically made to
resemble the keloid scarring that many post-Hiroshima radiation victims displayed.
Gojira’s
explicit raison d’être was to symbolize the horrors of nuclear fallout
and the dangers of pursuing research in such technology. His sub-text was more
of a super-text for a generation of Japanese who were trying to put the horrors
of World War Two behind them.
Throughout
the movie we see the sort of carnage that Gojira can unleash and the helplessness
of those whom he is discommoding. These scenes are all shot using miniatures
with the film rate sped up so that the action moves slower than normal: this helps
makes the splashing water, flames and clouds of smoke seem more realistic. Panicking
people are spliced into the scenes to create tension and there are plenty of
interior shots where buildings collapse upon the doomed while Gojira’s tail
passes by the window outside. These scenes are all strikingly conveyed, and the
gloomy wide shots of Tokyo ablaze strongly resemble photos of the real fire-bombings
that the Allied forces beleaguered the nation with. Unlike later Gojira films,
these scenes are not meant to provoke cheers and laughter – they are grim and
frightening.
Aside
from the big lizard, there are other things going on as well. Early in the piece,
a likable chap named Ogata is forced to bail on a theatre session with his best
girl, Emiko Yamane. As head of a salvage operation, he is called in to help discover
what happened to the missing ship. A rescue ship is sent out, but it also
vanishes. Another ship accompanied by helicopters also disappears. Radio
contacts from fishing vessels and the nearby Ohto Island determine that a
handful of survivors have been rescued and talk of a “monster” is rife. Next,
Gojira walks over Ohto Island during a typhoon, stomping some villagers and
their houses in the process. A research party goes to the island, led by Emiko’s
father Professor Kyohei Yamane (played by Takashi Shimura, leader of “The
Seven Samurai”), and they find footprints, a living trilobite and high
radiation levels before running into Gojira himself, hiding under a hill.
Intercut
with the carnage and mayhem, we see an unfolding tale of human morality. Emiko
likes Ogata and he likes her in return, but she is engaged to the reclusive Dr.
Daisuke Serizawa, who has dedicated himself to his research and shuns the world,
having lost an eye in the recent conflict. According to the Japanese model of typecasting,
Ogata is a ‘type A’ personality, quick-acting and tempestuous while Serizawa is
a ‘B-type’, brooding and mysterious. Emiko is a typical Japanese movie heroine,
trying to be everybody’s friend at once and getting torn up because of it. The
governmental agencies of Japan are determined to destroy Gojira at all costs,
but Professor Yamane wants to capture and study the big lizard – he retires to
his darkened study to ponder the wasted possibilities. Various attempts at
containment fail and so the army is called in – for all the good they do. As
Yamane points out, it took a nuclear explosion to wake Gojira up; the only
thing that will harm him is something much more powerful than that.
Of
course, Serizawa has just the thing. While trying to completely “understand
oxygen” he stumbled on a means of destroying the molecule and invented a weapon
called the Oxygen Destroyer. He shows the effects of this contraption to Emiko
(who is horrified at what it does to a tank of fish) and he makes her promise
to tell no-one about it – he doesn’t want to see it become the new Atomic Bomb.
Of course, while helping the victims of Gojira’s rampage, she tells Ogata all
about it and they both go to him to try and convince him to use it against the
monster. Serizawa says “no” and he and Ogata clash, before some bravely singing
schoolgirls, caroling in the face of calamity on TV, cause him to have a change
of heart. He destroys his notes, builds the bomb, and kills himself while
setting it off, telling Ogata and Emiko to be happy together.
As
Gojira gets skeletonized deep below the waves, Yamane makes the gloomy
prognostication that, even though Gojira is dead, another might appear as long
as humanity keeps messing about with nuclear power. Sequel anyone?
I’ve
noted many times in the past that it’s the ingenuity inspired by the lack of
easy options or costly technologies that can really make or break a movie. Throwing
money at a problem is usually not as good as thinking creatively around it. This
movie does all of that and more. Some shots look a little creaky, but since the
whole method is uniform, it’s easy to take on board. There are some wonky scenes
with crashing firetrucks but even these aren’t too egregious. The scenes of
Gojira wading through a model city are spliced together with real-life footage
of actual parts of Tokyo to good effect. The human-level action forms a kind of
Greek chorus to the unbridled destruction of the uncaring Gojira and is
well-portrayed. This bi-level narrative structure – monsters on one hand;
people on the other – has become something of a hallmark of these kaiju
stories and some of the films make it work, while others don’t. The Godzilla
2014 crew must have thought they were paying homage – or making a pastiche –
of the technique, but they forgot to make the human part of the drama at all
cohesive, and – despite having CGI out the wazoo – chose to turn away from the
monster action rather than showing it, as if they didn’t have the
technology to make it happen. Weird!
In
the final analysis, if you want to see a kaiju film – be it part of the Gojira
universe, a King Kong re-make or even a Pacific Rim franchise movie –
take the time to check this out as well. It might seem a little slow for modern
tastes, but it’s the real deal and the one against which all others should be
measured.
Four
tentacled horrors from me.
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