Godzilla (1954)
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Godzilla Movie Review
Godzilla is a 1954 Japanese kaiju film directed by Ishiro Honda. It’s one of the best and most influential monster movies of all time.
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“But if we continue conducting nuclear tests,
it’s possible that another Godzilla might appear
somewhere in the world again“
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Japan’s authorities deal with the sudden appearance of a giant monster, whose attacks trigger fears of nuclear holocaust during post-war Japan. It genuinely surprised me how sophisticated this movie turned out to be. I had been reading about it being a metaphor, but I have been refusing to believe it until watching the film when I realized that the critics have been right all along. It’s much smarter than you’d think it would be.
The monster in this film made Japanese audience empathize with it. This movie, although a blockbuster at surface, is a political allegory at its core while serving as sort of a therapy for audiences of its time. This picture blames the United States for everything that happened to the Japanese in WWII, but it also emphasizes on the dangers of nuclear testing and weapons. The monster stands for the nuclear terror in its unstoppable nature while the film’s pacifist message at the end was wonderful.
I also liked the characters, though of course their development could have been even better. The movie never really decides whether it wants to focus on just a few important characters or a bigger crowd, thus it operates as this awkward early transitional picture from a drama to an all-out disaster picture.
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The acting is excellent with every single actor and actress delivering in spades. The main couple of characters are excellent and Serizawa is particularly memorable as a hero who sacrificed himself for the greater good. Some of the conversations in the movie regarding the ethics were superb, but the scientific conversations were decidedly weaker in comparison. Even though I liked these main characters, some of their subplots I thought were unnecessary and again the mixture of different approaches to characterization bothered me personally.
Godzilla is a movie that truly became a full-on disaster flick only in its second half where Tokyo gets rampaged by this primeval beast in what are some very intense, memorable and hugely entertaining sequences of utter chaos and destruction. This was the peak of disaster films during this early period in cinema history, so it needs to be respected for feeling so grandiose.
My main issue with the beast is its look. I did like the explanation that it comes from an ancient period and that it transitioned from a previously aquatic creature. Its resemblance to a dinosaur is very interesting and the creature is memorable in its look for sure, but the VFX are so cheap, even for its time. Kong in the 1933 classic looked much better because claymation is so much prettier than suitmation. A guy in a suit always bothered me as it’s the worst type of effect you can choose to do, thus the movie was limited by this quite a bit.
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Godzilla as a result never quite achieved proper scares, but the score and sound came the closest at conveying tension. The roar is memorable, the destruction sounds great for its time and the score is just amazing, eerie and incredibly intense. The cinematography and the direction are also pretty good, but the runtime was short, and more could have been done with this premise overall.
