Kaiju Battle
  • Home
  • Features
    • Kaiju Battle Vision
    • Saturday Showcase
    • Creature Feature
    • Creator Close-Up
    • Classic Comics
    • Character Close-Up
    • FanWorks >
      • Artwork/Customs
      • FanFics/Projects
      • Events/Cons
    • Godmera's Fandom
  • Movies/Media
    • Godzilla/Toho
    • Godzilla/Legendary
    • Gamera
    • Pacific Rim
    • King Kong
    • Ultra Universe
    • Other Kaiju
  • Collectibles
    • Godzilla/Toho Collectibles
    • Monsterverse Collectibles
    • Gamera Collectibles
    • Pacific Rim Collectibles
    • Ultra Universe Collectibles
    • Other Kaiju Collectibles
  • Comics/Books
    • IDW Godzilla
    • Marvel/Dark Horse
    • Legendary/Monsterverse
    • Pacific Rim Comics
    • Other Kaiju Comics
    • Magazines/Books
  • Databases
    • Figure Database >
      • X-Plus Toho/Daiei/Other >
        • X-Plus 30 cm Godzilla/Toho Part One
        • X-Plus 30 cm Godzilla/Toho Part Two
        • X-Plus Large Monster Series Godzilla/Toho Part One
        • X-Plus Large Monster Series Godzilla/Toho Part Two
        • X-Plus Godzilla/Toho Pre-2007
        • X-Plus Godzilla/Toho Gigantic Series
        • X-Plus Daiei/Pacific Rim/Other
        • X-Plus Daiei/Other Pre-2009
        • X-Plus Toho/Daiei DefoReal/More Part One
        • X-Plus Toho/Daiei DefoReal/More Part Two
        • X-Plus Godzilla/Toho Other Figure Lines
        • X-Plus Classic Creatures & More
        • Star Ace/X-Plus Classic Creatures & More
      • X-Plus Ultraman >
        • X-Plus Ultraman Pre-2012 Part One
        • X-Plus Ultraman Pre-2012 Part Two
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2012 - 2013
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2014 - 2015
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2016 - 2017
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2018 - 2019
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2020 - 2021
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2022 - 2023
        • X-Plus Ultraman Gigantics/DefoReals
        • X-Plus Ultraman RMC
        • X-Plus Ultraman RMC Plus
        • X-Plus Ultraman Other Figure Lines
        • X-Plus Tokusatsu
      • Bandai/Tamashii >
        • S.H. MonsterArts Part One
        • S.H. MonsterArts Part Two
        • S.H. Figuarts Part One
        • S.H. Figuarts Part Two
        • S.H. Figuarts Part Three
        • Figuarts Other Ultraman Lines
        • Ultra-Act
        • Tamashii/Bandai Pacific Rim
        • Bandai Creation
      • Banpresto
      • NECA >
        • NECA Godzilla/Kong
        • NECA Pacific Rim
      • Medicom Toys >
        • Medicom Toys Part One
        • Medicom Toys Part Two
        • Medicom Toys Part Three
        • Medicom Toys Part Four
        • Medicom Toys Other Figure Lines
      • Kaiyodo/Revoltech
      • Diamond Select Toys
      • Funko/Jakks/Others
      • Playmates Toys
      • Art Spirits
      • Mezco Toyz
    • Movie Database >
      • Toho Godzilla Movies
      • Toho Monster Movies
      • Legendary Monsterverse Movies
      • Gamera/Daiei Movies
      • U.S. Monster Movies
      • International Monster Movies
      • Monster Suits
    • Comic/Book Database >
      • Comicbook Database
      • Book Database
  • Marketplace
  • Kaiju Addicts
Picture

THE SECRETS OF GODZILLA

4/20/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
From The New Yorker by Richard Brody

My artistic career was ended by Godzilla—as a child monster-movie maniac, I stopped attending painting classes when the long-awaited film (the American version, of course, starring Raymond Burr) showed up on Saturday-morning television. So I take the weeklong run of the Burr-free 1954 Japanese-language original, which begins today at Film Forum, personally. I missed the 2004 screenings of the restoration, so this revival is a welcome chance to catch up with it, and the experience is surprising.

The first surprise is that the original version, directed by Ishiro Honda, is not a kids’ movie, not a hectic teen goof, not a grindhouse shocker but a serious drama of politics, romance, and conscience (both civic and intimate). The two versions are offered together in Criterion’s DVD double set, and it’s a commonplace that, in the Hollywood version, from 1956, the movie’s cautionary doings—regarding undersea nuclear testing, the nerve-jangling threat of atomic weapons, and Japan’s enduring trauma at being their victim—are drastically toned down, and its bitterness toward the United States for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is elided. In the Japanese version, a parliamentary discussion of the monster’s attacks devolves into fury when an official suggests suppressing the nuclear origins of Godzilla’s return—in order not to damage “diplomatic relations”—and the families of victims react with outrage.

Secrecy—one of the major themes in the Japanese cinema, via the depiction of rigid social codes that impede the uninhibited expression of emotion in private life—plays a major role in “Godzilla,” too (in both versions). The one weapon that might prove effective against the colossus is the work of a reclusive scientist, who discloses his invention to the woman he loves—the daughter of a paleontologist who’s part of the official response team—but she, for her part, is in love with another man, a young shipping-line official who is also involved in the battle.

Picture
There are two greater secrets at work in the original, and they’re absent from the American version: the scientist’s crisis of conscience over the prospect that he has created a weapon of mass destruction that will, like nuclear arms, inevitably proliferate, and the paleontologist’s desire to preserve the monster not just (as in the American version) for disinterested scientific study but to extract the secret of its resistance to radiation. In short, the rational hero of the original, a principled technocrat, rues the combat against a monster that’s laying waste to the country because he thinks that it may hold the key to Japan’s surviving a greater threat, nuclear war. (In response, the young shipping executive disagrees, deeming Godzilla “no different from the H-bomb hanging over our heads.”)

The second surprise is that—despite the many scenes, themes, and touches that are missing—the hacked-up and adulterated American version is better. It starts with an American journalist named Steve Martin (played by Burr), who is injured in Godzilla’s attack on Tokyo and turns the story into his extended flashback and first-person account. The additional footage featuring Martin and a few other added characters (notably, Martin’s friend, a Japanese officer, played by Frank Iwanaga) was directed by Terry Morse, flatly and unimaginatively, but the splicing is sufficiently deft, and Burr’s crackling voice-over covers the gaps—and, even more important, his voice creates a point of view and reveals a means of transmission. Martin mediates the movie and, in the process, gives it a kick of modernity. The story of Godzilla is the story of the attack’s reporting, of how a series of events coalesces into a narrative—and the single best moment in both versions takes place during Godzilla’s assault on Tokyo, when Martin expects to be killed and, in the hope of leaving a record of the events, brings out a suitcase-size reel-to-reel deck and records, in real time, a testamentary narration on tape. (The second-best thing is the surprisingly mournful, non-stirring music in the climactic hunt, which is the same in both versions.)

The flashback structure thwarts the incremental experience of Godzilla’s menace, the element of surprise within the suspense. What it especially sacrifices is shock, the sheer terror at the scope of destruction, which, in the English-language version, is apparent at the outset, as in a report of an actual disaster: the news has broken in a headline, the full story fills in the details, and it arrives by way of an intrepid and heroic reporter, the extra variable in the Godzilla event who’s subject to it yet remains outside it even as he defines it.

Picture
The third surprise is that I don’t think that either “Godzilla” is near the top of the genre, or is especially classical for anything other than iconic value—I think that the creature is famous for signifying the great movie monster without actually being one. The main problem is that Godzilla itself isn’t very interesting. The monster is a principle of pure destruction: it’s not feeding on human flesh or farm animals or asphalt or electricity; it’s just laying waste to whatever’s in its path, stomping and swatting and smashing and exhaling a fiery dragon breath for the sheer hell of it. In theory, the idea of a nihilistic monster is as good as the idea of a reflective one, a tormented one, or a hungry one—provided that it’s developed. Godzilla, the lord of the land and sea, has no objective, no goal, no guiding principle; it has been jolted from its somnolence, its habitat has been despoiled, and now it despoils ours. Godzilla is a premise, a device, and a look, but not a being; for all its violence, it’s essentially static.

Monsters are the realm of the child’s psyche, the projection of inchoate fears in concrete, quasi-personified forms, and even the ones that are meant for adults resonate with the unconscious. Incomprehension battles with comprehension, the unexpressed conflicts with the desire to see, the near-ridiculous and the audaciously comical arise from the gravest horrors and the deepest fears. That’s why the tabloid hysteria of drive-in sci-fi and the inspired regressiveness of Jerry Lewis and Frank Tashlin make for fifties monsters of unabated fecundity and enduring power. Where monster matters turn sternly adult, it takes backroom gameswomanship in the vein of Howard Hawks’s “The Thing from Another World” to play up the genre’s exotic overtones.

The earnest sobriety of “Godzilla” gets in the way—it thwarts both the histrionically but authentically puerile and the dangerously, irreparably adult. It is, for the worse, a serious movie. The morning I dropped art school for the broadcast of “Godzilla” left me feeling foolish for falling for the hype; the movie was a disappointment then and, nearly half a century later, it disappoints still.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.


    Archives

    December 2022
    October 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    May 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    December 2015
    September 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    May 2011


    Categories

    All
    Events
    Games
    Godzilla 2016
    Godzilla Anime
    Godzilla Art
    Godzilla Movies
    Godzilla TV Series
    Monster Music
    Reviews
    Trailers


    RSS Feed



About Kaiju Battle
Links & Friends
Contact Us
Privacy Policy

© 2011-2023 Kaiju Battle. All Rights Reserved.
Visit Our Social Media Sites
Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Features
    • Kaiju Battle Vision
    • Saturday Showcase
    • Creature Feature
    • Creator Close-Up
    • Classic Comics
    • Character Close-Up
    • FanWorks >
      • Artwork/Customs
      • FanFics/Projects
      • Events/Cons
    • Godmera's Fandom
  • Movies/Media
    • Godzilla/Toho
    • Godzilla/Legendary
    • Gamera
    • Pacific Rim
    • King Kong
    • Ultra Universe
    • Other Kaiju
  • Collectibles
    • Godzilla/Toho Collectibles
    • Monsterverse Collectibles
    • Gamera Collectibles
    • Pacific Rim Collectibles
    • Ultra Universe Collectibles
    • Other Kaiju Collectibles
  • Comics/Books
    • IDW Godzilla
    • Marvel/Dark Horse
    • Legendary/Monsterverse
    • Pacific Rim Comics
    • Other Kaiju Comics
    • Magazines/Books
  • Databases
    • Figure Database >
      • X-Plus Toho/Daiei/Other >
        • X-Plus 30 cm Godzilla/Toho Part One
        • X-Plus 30 cm Godzilla/Toho Part Two
        • X-Plus Large Monster Series Godzilla/Toho Part One
        • X-Plus Large Monster Series Godzilla/Toho Part Two
        • X-Plus Godzilla/Toho Pre-2007
        • X-Plus Godzilla/Toho Gigantic Series
        • X-Plus Daiei/Pacific Rim/Other
        • X-Plus Daiei/Other Pre-2009
        • X-Plus Toho/Daiei DefoReal/More Part One
        • X-Plus Toho/Daiei DefoReal/More Part Two
        • X-Plus Godzilla/Toho Other Figure Lines
        • X-Plus Classic Creatures & More
        • Star Ace/X-Plus Classic Creatures & More
      • X-Plus Ultraman >
        • X-Plus Ultraman Pre-2012 Part One
        • X-Plus Ultraman Pre-2012 Part Two
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2012 - 2013
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2014 - 2015
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2016 - 2017
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2018 - 2019
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2020 - 2021
        • X-Plus Ultraman 2022 - 2023
        • X-Plus Ultraman Gigantics/DefoReals
        • X-Plus Ultraman RMC
        • X-Plus Ultraman RMC Plus
        • X-Plus Ultraman Other Figure Lines
        • X-Plus Tokusatsu
      • Bandai/Tamashii >
        • S.H. MonsterArts Part One
        • S.H. MonsterArts Part Two
        • S.H. Figuarts Part One
        • S.H. Figuarts Part Two
        • S.H. Figuarts Part Three
        • Figuarts Other Ultraman Lines
        • Ultra-Act
        • Tamashii/Bandai Pacific Rim
        • Bandai Creation
      • Banpresto
      • NECA >
        • NECA Godzilla/Kong
        • NECA Pacific Rim
      • Medicom Toys >
        • Medicom Toys Part One
        • Medicom Toys Part Two
        • Medicom Toys Part Three
        • Medicom Toys Part Four
        • Medicom Toys Other Figure Lines
      • Kaiyodo/Revoltech
      • Diamond Select Toys
      • Funko/Jakks/Others
      • Playmates Toys
      • Art Spirits
      • Mezco Toyz
    • Movie Database >
      • Toho Godzilla Movies
      • Toho Monster Movies
      • Legendary Monsterverse Movies
      • Gamera/Daiei Movies
      • U.S. Monster Movies
      • International Monster Movies
      • Monster Suits
    • Comic/Book Database >
      • Comicbook Database
      • Book Database
  • Marketplace
  • Kaiju Addicts