Review: GOOOJIIIRAAA!

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.