Monday, July 3, 2017
184 - Godzilla, 1954, Japan. Dir. Ishiro Honda.
Help us, Serizawa. You're our only hope.
Serizawa is a scientist.
He has developed the Oxygen Destroyer.
It consumes all the oxygen in the space in which is it used.
This in turn causes all life forms in that space to cease to exist.
Emiko has an idea.
Maybe it could be used to kill Godzilla.
Godzilla has been terrorizing Tokyo, and many people have perished.
Serizawa showed the Oxygen Destroyer to Emiko when he had hopes for their relationship.
They were matched up, as people can be.
She is the only person he has told about it, the only one who knows of its existence.
She promised him that she would not tell.
But she breaks her promise.
In order to save the world.
Emiko tells Ogata.
He is a good man.
He is the one she loves and wants to be with.
But none of it matters if they are all about to die.
So they take a risk.
They go to Serizawa and reveal their plan. They ask him to forgive them.
He does.
He helps.
He saves the world.
And sacrifices his life in return.
Ishiro Honda was an Assistant Director and collaborator for Akira Kurosawa. He worked with him on Stray Dog (1949), Kagamusha (1980), Ran (1985), Dreams (1990), and Rhapsody in August (1991).
Before that, he was the Assistant Director for Kajiro Yamamoto.
Tomoyuki Tanaka was a producer who also worked with Kurosawa. He had just had a movie fall through that was to take place in Indonesia. During his return from Indonesia, he began to conceive of a giant monster movie.
Giant monster movies were not yet a thing in Japan. In fact, they were hardly a thing in the United States. The Lost World, featuring dinosaurs, had come out in 1925, King Kong in 1933, and Mighty Joe Young in 1949. Three major examples in twenty-four years.
King Kong had been one of the most successful movies of its day, but for some reason it had not yet developed into a franchise or genre. Yes, The Son of Kong had come out the same year, in 1933, and a Japanese silent version, King Kong Appears in Edo, had come out in 1938, but otherwise the field lay mostly silent.
But when King Kong was rereleased in 1952, a new generation saw it, and something took hold of the movie-going public.
The next year, in 1953, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was released, featuring the stop-motion effects of the now legendary Ray Harryhausen. Both the rerelease of King Kong and the release of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms were successful in Japan.
These successes were on Tomoyuki Tanaka's mind as he tried to conceive of a new idea to replace the Indonesian film that had just fallen through.
Nuclear fallout was also on his mind.
The atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade before, in 1945, but fallout was back in the news. The United States was conducting tests in the Bikini Atoll when, on March 1, 1954, an unexpectedly large blast got picked up by an unexpectedly large wind, and radioactive ash was carried outside and beyond the danger zone.
Lucky Dragon No. 5, a tuna fishing boat, was working the waters outside the zone. Then the blast came. First, the light. Then, the sound. Then, the ash. The men scooped up the ash with their bare hands and put it into bags before leaving the area. One of them famously licked it.
They would later call it the "death ash."
In the end, however, only one of them died, and he died from contracting Hepatitis C from a bad blood transfusion. The rest recovered.
With these ideas in mind, Tanaka wrote an outline for The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Hollywood is not the only one that steals story ideas.
Tanaka's executive producer greenlit the project and advised Tanaka to make it a priority.
Tanaka hired Ishiro Honda to direct, and the team created a new character, a new franchise, and a new genre.
They created the character of Godzilla.
They launched the Godzilla franchise, which now holds the Guinness World Record for being the longest running movie franchise in history.
Thirty Godzilla films have been made in Japan, with the most recent released in 2017.
Half a dozen Godzilla films have been made in America, with new ones slated for release in 2019 and 2020.
They created the Kaiju genre. Kaiju means Strange Beast. A Kaiju Eiga is a Strange Beast Movie. The genre is the giant monster movie.
The San Daikaiju are the three great monsters, Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra.
The movie and the genre were so successful that Ishiro Honda would go on to create many monsters and direct many monster movies before returning to work with Akira Kurosawa.
The original Godzilla notably features the world-class acting talent of Takashi Shimura. Shimura was a Kurusowa staple, and after his starring role in Ikiru two years before (1952), The New York Times stated that he "measures up through his performance in this picture with the top film actors anywhere."
While Toshiro Mifune famously starred in 16 of Kurosawa's films, Shimura appeared in 21 of them.
What Shimura brings to Godzilla is the gravitas and humanity of a scientist caught in the middle of an impossible dilemma. He wants to save Tokyo, but he also wants to spare Godzilla. Rather than kill him, he wishes to understand him.
Honda balanced Godzilla by alternating between ahead-of-its-time special effects action sequences and masterfully shot quiet moments of human drama.
This is more than a B picture.
It is a record of a society wrestling with the effects of war, nuclear radiation, guilt, fear, human suffering, good and evil, and the paradoxically opposite uses of science.
In the midst of the mayhem, Honda pauses to feature a chorus of hundreds of girls standing in rows, singing the "Prayer for Peace."
* * * * *
1925 - The Lost World, prehistoric reptilian monsters
1933 - King Kong
1952 - King Kong rereleased
1952 - The Thing from Another World
1953 - The Beast of 20,000 Fathoms, dinosaur revived and reradiated by nuclear radiation
Rodan (1956) - mutan pterosaur, prehistoric insect
The Mysterians (1957) - aliens, a giant robot
Half Human (1958) - a monster and his son living in an island cave
Daikiju Baran (1958) - Varan, giant monster in a mysterious salt-water lake
The H-Man (1958) - radioactive creatures resulting from H-Bomb tests
Mothra (1961) - a gigantic moth, one-foot tall women
Varan the Unbelievable (1962) - Obaki, a prehistoric monster
King Kong Versus Godzilla (1962) - King Kong
Gorath (1962) - giant meteor, giant walrus
Matango (1963) - survivors of a shipwreck transform into mushrooms
Atragon (1963) - snake-like
Dogora (1964) - a giant jellyfish monster from outer space
Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964) - a gigantic baby moth
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) - a three-headed monster
Invasion of the Astro-Monster (1965) - aliens from Planet X
The War of the Gargantuas (1966) - experimental lab animal
Space Amoeba (1970) - giant mutant monsters
Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) - mecha godzilla
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