But if we don’t use your device against Godzilla, what are we going to do? ✵ Godzilla - FEAR AND WONDER ✵ 1950–1959 - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Science fiction

DIRECTOR

Ishirô Honda

WRITERS

Takeo Murata, Ishirô Honda (screenplay); Shigeru Kayama (story)

STARS

Akira Takarada, Momoko Kôchi, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura

BEFORE

1949 Ishirô Honda works as assistant director on Stray Dog, a film noir directed by his friend Akira Kurosawa.

1953 In Honda’s Eagle of the Pacific, special effects are created by Eiji Tsuburaya, who would go on to create Godzilla.

AFTER

1961 Atomic tests summon another monster in Honda’s movie Mothra, about a giant moth terrorizing Tokyo.

Godzilla (Gojira in Japanese) is a low-budget monster movie in which a giant lizard rises from the Pacific Ocean and attacks Tokyo. For all the clumsiness of its special effects, the monster of Ishiro Honda’s movie resonated powerfully with its audiences in 1954.

The creature remains mostly in shadow as an indistinct threat, while the grainy, black-and-white imagery is chillingly reminiscent of newsreel footage from August 1945, when atom bombs were dropped on Japan in the final days of World War II. Japanese viewers were therefore no strangers to the concept of horrific new threats and mass devastation. Honda is bold in his use of images ripped straight from his country’s recent memory: huge, white-hot explosions that turn night into day; Tokyoites cowering in concrete bunkers as cityscapes crumble to rubble. The only hope of defeating Godzilla is a device called the “oxygen destroyer,” another grim invention of human progress. Honda, a nature lover, saw his lizard-king as Earth’s revenge for science’s environmental recklessness.

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Honda saw Godzilla as means of absorbing the trauma of the atom bomb attacks into Japanese culture.

Mega franchise

Godzilla spawned a franchise of monster proportions, with sequels stretching from 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again to the US blockbuster of 2014, although the creature itself has become an icon of kitsch.

What else to watch: King Kong (1933) ✵ The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) ✵ Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971) ✵ Monsters (2010) ✵ Pacific Rim (2013)