Oh no, there goes Tokyo!
A long look at an old classic — Ishirō Honda's unforgettable 1954 film.
This review contains spoilers for a movie released in...1954. No apologies. If you haven't seen the original Godzilla, and would like to, it's completely free on the Internet Archive. It's only 90 minutes!
It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that the concept of Godzilla originated with this one film. There was no book, no legend; the longest-running film franchise of all time started right here.
Of course, a shout-out is necessary to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, another giant lizard awoken from its hiberation due to atomic bomb testing on year earlier, in 1953. But rhedosaurus isn't as catchy as Godzilla.
Easier to understand is the revelation that upon its initial release, Godzilla received mixed reviews from audiences. The human elements of the film — the majority of the running time — are at times strong and at times very weak. Aside from a giant dinosaur, our main cast of characters includes:
Dr. Kyohei Yamane, a paleontologist sent to research Godzilla's emergence
Emiko Yamane, Kyohei's beautiful and sensitive daughter
Hideto Ogata, Emiko's lover and the captain of a salvage ship
Dr. Daisuke Serizawa, Dr. Yamane's younger colleague and Emiko's friend/fiancé
Our characters spend most of their time lamenting the violence that has beset modern society, whether at the hands of Godzilla or of man. This is especially true in the case of Dr. Yamane, who is sent into a depressive stupor by the idea that the Japanese government actually wants to kill the horrific beast killing civilians, destroying multiple cities, and wrecking their economy, instead of "studying its resistance to radiation." (How, exactly, you would peacefully study a 150-foot tall dinosaur capable of sinking freight ships and hell-bent on revenge for humanity's disruption of the natural order is beyond me, and never specified in the film.)
Everyone else is okay with killing Godzilla though. I mean, gotta do what you gotta do.
While watching, I kept wondering how bizarre it would be to release, only nine years after the fact, some kind of thematically-similar movie about a giant monster emerging from the World Trade Center and wreaking havock on the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11. I ended up reasoning that this kind of actually happened in real life, only the monster, after waking up, struck out at lightning speed towards somewhere called “The Middle East” that it could barely gesture at on a map.
Back on topic.
Although Godzilla isn't exactly a hero, as he comes to be later on in the franchise, the film is very open about his status as a sympathetic villain. Sure, he sinks boats, destroys towns, eats livestock, gives people radiation sickness with his atomic breath, but ultimately he, too, is a victim of the Cold War arms race. Who among us hasn't been awoken from a satisfying slumber to the sounds of destruction for destruction's sake?
A significant part of Godzilla's destructive power isn't even inherent to the species (whatever species that may be). Nuclear testing on the ocean floor is the only reason radiation poses a threat to the cities in his path. The film is fairly clear about naming the United States as the root problem in this scenario, specifically its arms race build up, while also going so far as to vaguely address the political infeasibility of publicly naming the actual villains in-universe as the U.S. nuclear forces. It's a compelling, if brief, observation on the precarious international political situation Japan was in following World War II — and, if its opposition to the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is any indication despite intense domestic support for nuclear disarmament, the international situation it might still be in.
One highlight of this nature rests at the beginning of the film - the disappearance of fishing boats and freighters, intentionally paralleling the real incident that befell the Lucky Dragon No.5, along with almost a thousand other fishing vessels.
In March of the same year that Godzilla was written, shot, and released, the Castle Bravo nuclear test exceeded its expected "danger zone" centered around Bikini Atoll. The bomb was more than twice as powerful as predicted, due to scientist misestimation of the lithium's reactivity. Fifteen nearby atolls were contaminated, including Rongelap and Rongerik atolls, where the people of Bikini Atoll had already been removed to at the beginning of the nuclear weapons program. The indigenous and displaced people living in the surrounding area suffered from acute radiation poisoning, miscarriages, and tumors at high rates, and continue to suffer from the ongoing contamination of their islands, lost means of self-sufficiency, and other incalculable social and cultural losses.
The most famous story resulting from the Castle Bravo disaster, though, follows the Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryū Maru. One of 856 fishing vessels, including more than 20,000 crew members, affected by fallout from the test, the crew of the Lucky Dragon No.5 accumulated radiation doses higher than 300 rems each, high enough to cause radiation burns and Hematopoietic syndrome — serious radiation sickness requiring immediate medical attention and many blood transfusions to combat the drop in white blood cells. When the tuna these fishing boats were catching appeared in Osaka and Tokyo, investigation revealed that it was highly radioactive, resulting in the Japanese market for fish all but collapsing temporarily. Kuboyama Aikichi, the boat's radio operator, died from complications of radiation sickness.
In Godzilla, the fishermen and freighter crews on the missing ships develop no radiation sickness, and receive no medical attention. Instead, they never come home at all. Throughout the film, the audience bears witness to the worried family members, tearful widows, and orphaned children of the crews, asking politicians and businessmen for answers to unthinkable questions.
Some time passes in a weaker section of the film as we get to know Emiko; her father; her boyfriend; and hear about her mysterious arranged fiancé, Serizawa.
The heart of the film takes place when Serizawa is on the stage. With his eyepatch, standoffish nature (to everyone except Emiko, that is), and unspecified, horrifying research, he brings to mind a tortured scientist plucked straight out of the Romantic era. He's established as having some kind of terrifying superweapon, but we don't find out exactly what it is until Act III is well under way.
If you came to Godzilla looking for scientific accuracy, I'm sorry for you. Serizawa's secret scientific project, the "Oxygen Destroyer," made me glad the slow pace of the film had put my scientifically-inclined partner to sleep. It's as fantastical as Godzilla himself, a way to "disintegrate oxygen atoms and cause organisms to die of a rotting asphyxiation" if submerged in water. (Then again, some experts said nuclear weapons were impossible; who am I to say? I'm not a scientist.)
After the Oxygen Destroyer's big reveal, Emiko and Hideto make impassioned pleas for him to use it against Godzilla to save Tokyo, leading to Serizawa's clearly articulated and equally impassioned reluctance to reveal his dangerous discoveries, lest they be used to cause more harm to humans in the future. The heartfelt articulation of the scientist's inner struggle and strong ethical center was a welcome surprise when I partially expected the film to be thematically closer to modern Godzilla movies, i.e., more or less morally vacant.
In thinking back on the advent of the nuclear bomb, many seem to think its construction, deployment, usage, and growth into an arms race was inevitable as soon as humanity figured out it was possible. Serizawa's response serves as a simple and devastating rebuttal to this kind of thinking, as well as to Oppenheimer's famous regret about his involvement in the Manhattan Project: rather than allow your work to do such incalculable harm to humanity, you should have chosen to die. Even if its rediscovery seems inevitable, rather than allow your life's work to be so devastating, rather than allow politicians to bully you into giving them the upper hand in a war where everyone loses, you should have chosen to die. That is the burden of the scientist.
The emotional climax of the film walks hand-in-hand with the (short-lived?) defeat of Godzilla: Serizawa's sacrifice. As an amateur diver going down into the water with his fiancé's lover — a professional diver who tried to insist on releasing the superweapon himself — his lack of regard for his own safety pairs with his morbid speech about the danger of his research, and ironically leads to one inevitable conclusion. Slicing through the oxygen tube on his diving suit, Serizawa drowns himself, taking the secrets of his Oxygen Destroyer to his watery grave.
As the camera takes the viewer on a tour of the aftermath of Godzilla's rampage, witnessing deaths and injuries including maimings, burns, and radiation poisoning, the tone is dark, emotionally honest, but hopeful. It seems Emiko serves as a volunteer nurse, continuing her character's representation of some kind of archetypal feminine caregiver. With the knowledge that her fiancé, in his dying moment, has blessed her relationship with Hideto, we are able to imagine an optimistic future for the human characters in this story. However, a shadow lingers, as the threat of nuclear war lingers over the world - Godzilla was only one of a whole species of dinosaurs. Unless humanity comes together to pursue disarmament, how long will it be before another, bringing unimaginable death and destruction, rises from the ocean?
Great article, very informative and well written.
I, too, wrote one about the film (https://lucabaptista.substack.com/p/if-you-bomb-it-he-will-come) from a somewhat different viewpoint.