( Gojira / Ishiro Honda / 1954 )
Where most disaster/monster movies - even those with a supposed message like THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW - gleefully enjoy all the mayhem and tension, GODZILLA is near unique for its pervasive sense of melancholy. Explicitly themed around the terror of nuclear devastation, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far too recent events for GODZILLA to be anything but a tragedy with special effects. When Godzilla rampages around a city instead of simply providing amoral, fetishised destruction like Hollywood would inevitably do, keeping the victims either faceless or irrelevant, GODZILLA produces a cowering family whose mother announces to her children "You can see your father soon, we'll join him in heaven". The scientist who invents the weapon to destroy Godzilla agonises over whether to reveal it at all, fearing it could later be used against mankind. His solution, revolving around Japanese ideas of honor and sacrifice, feels like a direct attack against the scientists who helped with the technology leading to the A bomb. Even if they did not order the attacks themselves, GODZILLA implies, they are still guilty of a crime against humanity.
Whilst conceptually more impressive than the sillier GODZILLA VERSUS... offerings that followed, many disaster movie fans may well enjoy the sequels more, as they avoid the uneasy tension between monster smashing fun and guilt-placing moralising.
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