Away from the Hype: Godzilla (1954)

For 70 years we’ve lived in the shadow of the father of Kaijus, the king of monsters, the giant lizard they call Godzilla. And in those 70 years, we’ve seen many different iterations of the monster. He’s fought other monsters, King Kong, machines, and the might of the military. He is, depending on the movie, our destroyer or our savior, and his name is synonymous with destruction and terror.

So where did it all start? For me, it was in 1998 and Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla, an American take on the uniquely Japanese creation. He was, after all, created as a metaphor for the atomic bomb, a weapon only deployed against one country (and hopefully never again anywhere). 

Godzilla (1998) is a unique movie in that it has never, to my knowledge, been reappraised by modern viewers. So many other movies deemed a bit trashy or failures upon release go through the life cycle of being rediscovered later and found to be successes in disguise. Think The Phantom Menace, Speed Racer, Ang Lee’s Hulk, or Waterworld. Critical and/or financial misfires that found a second life.

There is no second life for Godzilla ‘98, a movie that felt like it was made by people who had never heard of Godzilla before and suffered from being miscast, being too long, and having a Diddy song leading the soundtrack, which is more a problem now than then but even then it sucked.

For a lot of other people, it started in 1954, with Ishirō Honda’s original Godzilla, a movie that spawned a franchise of nearly 40 sequels, remakes, and reboots. As a Film Guy™, I would usually watch something like Godzilla ‘98 and then want to trace back its origins. However, Godzilla ’98 was shite so it wouldn’t be until Gareth Edwards’ seminal Godzilla 2014 that I would return to Kaiju cinema with Godzilla 2014 (masterpiece), Godzilla: King of the Monsters (brilliant), Godzilla vs. Kong (terrible), Shin Godzilla (insanely boring/insanely good, if you know you know) and Godzilla Minus One (a modern classic.) 

With the Australian Centre of the Moving Image showing Godzilla ‘54 on the big screen, I finally had no excuse not to go back to where it all started and see what all the fuss was about, away from the hype.

Godzilla (1954)

What American Godzilla movies get so wrong (outside of 2014’s Godzilla) is they think the monster is the main character. And what good Godzilla movies get right is that they do the opposite. The monster is basically a McGuffin powering the human drama.

1998’s Godzilla and the Monsterverse other than Godzilla 2014 all make their human characters sources of exposition over drama. Kong: Skull Island was particularly egregious for this and I recall being in the cinema waiting for a line of dialogue that didn’t feel like narration and waiting all the way to the end credits. 

Those movies favor the big action scenes over the quiet human scenes. And that’s not what Godzilla is about. It’s about people in a room arguing about how to kill Godzilla. It’s about scientists and bureaucrats and the military putting aside their differences to stop a primordial force of destruction. It’s the little love stories that flourish or survive while trying not to be flattened by a foot the size of a city. 

Godzilla ‘54 provides the blueprint for this kind of kaiju storytelling. The monster himself is onscreen for just under 9 minutes of the entire movie’s 96-minute runtime. The rest of the time is spent talking about him and waiting for his reappearance. We never get a chance to forget Godzilla is out there, but we don’t need to see him in every frame of the movie to feel his presence. 

The human element of the story is split between the main scientist, Kyohei Yamane (Takashi Shimura), who believes that if Godzilla is the last of its species it needs to be protected and studied rather than destroyed, and his daughter, Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kōchi), who is engaged to another scientist, Daisuke Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), but wants to break off the engagement to be with salvage ship captain, Hideto Ogata (Akira Takarada).

Interestingly, many of the usual tropes that will dominate these kinds of movies are absent. For example, there is no gung-ho military man who dismisses the scientists out of hand to use excessive force. The input of the scientists is deemed very important for the survival of Japan, and in 2024, where experts can be distrusted over the contents of a Facebook post saying raw milk makes you immortal, it is very refreshing to see that.

The crux of this movie comes down to a simple idea. Serizawa has developed a means to kill Godzilla that is so powerful it makes the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like playground taunts. Those bombs were dropped on Japan only 9 years before the release of this movie so the idea that Serizawa would be weary to share his information for fear of it being weaponized outside of Godzilla-killing makes perfect sense even now, nearly 80 years after the bombs were dropped, but would have been such a poignant and potent idea in 1954.

Conclusion:

The debates at the heart of this movie: protecting the last of the species and not putting more apocalyptic weapons into the world, are still such powerful topics that even the man in a suit effects and the fighter jets on strings don’t take away from their force.

At my screening there were some giggles at the effects and the person sitting next to me at one point mumbled, “This is stupid” but if you go and see a 1954 monster movie, you can’t really expect cutting edge CGI. Instead, you get cutting edge model work, puppetry, and the notion that suspension of belief is required.

The effects in this movie are still very effective. The iconic monster’s appearances are always down with the right amount of pomp and circumstance, delivering awe whenever he appears to mess stuff up. I particularly liked the atomic breath effect which seemed to be smoke pumped out of the mouth of a Godzilla model but the shakiness of that part was counter-acted by the skill with which Ishirō Honda depicted the effect of the breath with melted pylons and exploding buildings.

Godzilla will always be the king of the monsters and different filmmakers will always put their spin on him. The fact that one of the best movies of 2023 was Godzilla Minus One goes to show that there’s still so much love for the character even when he’s depicted as a villain and force for carnage.

Watching Godzilla ‘54 and having an absolute ball with it, I’m not surprised that 70 years later, Godzilla is still doing big box office numbers and wowing audiences. And I don’t think he has any plans of retiring in the near or distant future.