Rabid's Showa-Era Godzilla Reviews

[Rabid]

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So I'm gonna come and write the first review tomorrow but I thought I'd finally go ahead and start this thread up!

Godzilla as a series has always held a special place for me. I grew up with the 1998 American movie (which I still have a soft spot for despite all the flaws) and watched it religiously on VHS when I was a child (I must have been about five when it came out) to the point of driving my parents nuts. At the time I was big into dinosaurs too so the whole fact that Godzilla looked like a giant spiked dinosaur was awesome!

As I grew up though I never really saw anything else. Sure, I'd occasionally catch something online when I was old enough to have semi-regular internet access and such (which at the time was mostly at school, we're talking circa 2005+) but really there was no real way for me to access anything else Godzilla related. Even today getting most of the movies, even the more recent ones, is almost impossible here in the UK. They're just not released.

There was also the stigma of it, I suppose. They're just dudes in suits! The effects are bad! and all the usual complaints the average teenager will have when they look at something that isn't big shiny modern CGI. But again, as I grew up and my interest grew I started really look into things and I found a whole world of fantastic and talented people who take the art of building sets and costume design to the next level and exceptionally fun movies.

The Godzilla series, for those who don't know, is broken up into three (technically four) 'era's' of movies, most if not all of which ignore every movie after the 1954 one in the Showa period and carry on from there, beyond the Showa period itself obviously.

Showa - The movies from 1954 to 1975. Characterised after the first two (very serious) movies by the increasing push towards child-friendly flicks.

Heisei - The moves from 1985 to 1995. Characterised by the much better effects (given the ten-year gap) and the ongoing storyline. Showa also has this but it's a little more explicit in these movies as things are referenced from prior movies in most cases.

Millennium - The movies from 1999 to 2004. Again, another step up in production and with much more CGI being used (though "CGI" had been used as far back as the first movie in a sense, just not with computers). All but two of the movies aren't linked, each with their own stories.

Then you have the 1998 movie, Legendaries recent Monsterverse, the anime movies and Shin Godzilla. I won't count those though.

In this case and for the sake of this thread I managed to pick up Criterion's limited boxed set of all of the Showa movies - which given the impossibility of getting almost any of the Japanese movies in the UK was a huge standout. And so that's what I'm reviewing, starting with the original 1954 movie!

Feel free to ask questions or whatever, too!

 

[Rabid]

Godzilla
1954
Dir. Ishirō Honda
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So this is the movie that started the entire franchise - and frankly compared to most of them it is outright nightmarish. It's a very bleak and very upfront anti-nuclear war movie and pulls absolutely no punches in putting that across. Nothing is glorified here, not even Godzilla - who himself is hinted to be a victim of the bomb tests and ends up taking out his rage and pain on an unsuspecting Tokyo.

What stands out to me - beyond the frankly insane level of detail in the sets that took literal months, the fantastic score by Akira Ifukube and the level of SFX that was risky for the time but was done because they wanted to elevate the movie - is the absolute and genuine seriousness at which the subject is approached.

You see this giant rampaging beast decimate famous landmarks, crushing people or killing them outright with blasts of his atomic breath (which in the first two movies is more like a vapour; it can super-heat metal and destroy vehicles but will also spread through city blocks and kill anyone it touches like radiation itself) and it isn't remotely played for laughs. The aftermath of the second attack is even more horrific, with the main characters visiting a hospital piled with the dead and dying where you see children crying as their parents corpses are taken away and a young schoolgirl being tested for radiation sickness - to the point the geiger counter being aimed at her is going absolutely crazy and you know she'll be dead in a few short weeks.

Godzilla is a natural disaster and a force of nature. The threat and the damage it creates - like the bombs that inspired it - are shown directly to the audience. There's no skimping on that. And yet, by the end, you feel for Godzilla. The last encounter has it being awoken from where it is sleeping on the sea floor, as any animal might. Godzilla isn't inherently evil in this movie, and the fact the suit's skin was made to partially reflect radiation burns wasn't likely a coincidence. It's suffering as much as the people are.

It was also one of the first Japanese movies to be dubbed for US release and did fantastically well as Godzilla, King of the Monsters in 1956.

Honestly, I can't give this movie enough praise. It isn't perfect and for some people it may come across as dated. But truthfully, if there's one movie I can recommend off the bat from this era, it'd be this one.

 

[Postal]

awful franchise

 

[MaXenzie]

are you gonna do reviews in chronological film order or are you just starting with the first film

 

[Rabid]

are you gonna do reviews in chronological film order or are you just starting with the first film

Chronological order, yeah. I have fourteen more to work through (technically thirteen because I watched Godzilla vs King Kong recently).

 

[Charlie]

Feel free to ask questions or whatever, too!

What you doing rn?

 

[Deleted member 442]

Are we going to see Godzilla vs. Kong together?