The American version of Godzilla (boastfully subtitled King of the Monsters) was one of those movies that held a special place in my childhood psyche. I taped it off TNT sometime around third or fourth grade and watched it so often that it became a sort of boredom standby movie- it I was bored, it was one on a short list of movies I watched. But I left Godzilla behind me when I became pretencious, around the time of the sixth or seventh grade.
Of course, I had entered the "in-between stage" of taste. I had realized that the Godzilla films had lousy special effects, bad and repitious plotlines as well as poor dubbing, but I had yet to discover the joys of those qualities. I had begun to watch movies for artstic qualities, but had no sense of irony. When I entered college and the opportunity to presented itself to see the movie again, I borrowed a friends copy of the American version as dove in, surprised to find that the movie wasn't all that cheesy but wasn't that good either. The main source of entertainment in the American version is watching Raymond Burr, an exceedingly strong character actor, awkwardly inserted into the Japanese footage to give Western audiences someone to identify with. Although I had watched the film over and over again as a child, I had never noticed that Burr's scenes are lit completly differantly, or that the sets he appears on have a differnt style of architecture than everyone else's, or how much time he spends talking to the back of people's heads.
I was about ready to be through with Godzilla forever (I had also borrowed my friends copy of Rodan, which is ass-boring), until I read that the original Japanese version of the film was apparently a really serious and possibly deep comment on nuclear energy and the American attack on Hiroshima. My interest was piqued. Could this be a lost masterpiece that was water downed for American audinces?
Unfortantley, the original version is not much better and is far longer than it needs to be. Expecting some kind of hardcore political discourse, I was dissapointed to find that the anti-nuclear message is rather pat and not that different than what had been seen in many American films. Making Godzilla (an American translation of the Japanese Gojira) a metaphor for the atomic bomb might have worked on paper, but the monster looks so fake that we can't be frightened of it. The movie has a much longer prolouge, which is actully inferior to its American counterpart. Say what you want about the redicoulouness of Burr's scenes, but at least the actor himself has gives the movie a raw energy that it's Eastern counterpart lacks.
The film's strongest scenes are the depitctions of the devestation of Godzilla, which look erriely the footage we've seen of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The music by Akira Ifukube is effective appropratiely somber, and the devestation is kind of sad- until we see the dinosaur again, and the movie stops working.
I think that the film's defenders are correct when they say that the movie isn't childist or stupid, but I disagree with them when they argue it's particularly smart or deep. The metaphore is simplistic and the filmmaking average, and many scenes are dull.
At some point, every cineaste will probably want to see at least one Japanese monster movie, just to see what this subgenre is about. But after seeing both this version of Godzilla and Rodan, I am through. These movies might be fun with a group of drunk people making smartass comments, but they aren't good enough to be entertaining, and this version of Godzilla isn't bad enough to be, either.
Gojira (1954)