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American nuclear weapons testing results in the creation of a seemingly unstoppable, dinosaur-like beast.
I have to admit, before I attended the screening for the original 1954 “Godzilla”, I had never seen it before. I had seen a couple of the many iterations that were produced over the years, including the dreadful 1998 American interpretation but I had never seen the original movie that started it all and I’m glad I was given this opportunity to do so. When I review a movie, I take everything into account, the acting, direction, cinematography, music, special effects, etc. so when I sat down to watch “Godzilla”, I had to go back in time to 1954 and imagine what it must have been like to see this motion picture on the big screen. It’s too easy to watch it now and laugh at the antiquated special effects and the general attempt by director Ishirô Honda to try and add some human exposition but this was a time before CGI when monster movies were typically relegated to the horror genre, with the Wolf Man, Frankenstein and Dracula, movies where the ‘special effects’ were very minimal but effective for their time.
The plot for the movie is very simple: after years of H-bomb testing in the Japanese ocean, the fallout from these experiments unearths, from the depths of the ocean, the huge behemoth that is Godzilla. He occasionally surfaces, attacks parts of the island and then disappears again. The old fishermen on the island claim that he is an ancient monster that they used to sacrifice women with, to satisfy the beast’s appetite but that he hasn’t been seen in thousands of years. The military build a huge electrical fence around the island as they prepare to battle the fire-breathing dragon before he tears Tokyo apart, leaving mayhem and destruction in his wake. For its time, “Godzilla” must have scared the living daylights out of movie audiences, much like “Jurassic Park” did back in 1993. I’ll be very curious to see how JP holds up in 2053, by then, I can’t even imagine how technically advanced movies will have become and whether the people of that time, will look back and laugh at how outdated the special effects are and Spielberg’s endeavor to add his trademark character development.
Throughout the film, I picked up on many cues that Spielberg obviously used in JP, especially the highly effective opening scene when all we observe is a shot of trees blowing in the wind. Slowly, we can hear something, obviously quite large, moving closer and closer, with branches snapping off, at which point Spielberg cleverly misleads the audience into thinking it’s the T-Rex but instead, it winds up being a large forklift carrying a Velociraptor cage. T-Rex doesn’t appear until well into the middle of the film and the director of “Godzilla”, Ishirô Honda, set the standard for that technique. In the opening of the movie, several ships disappear in a particular location and he doesn’t show us the beast, instead, we get water bubbling around the ship and we see the panic on the crew’s faces as they obviously see something huge and terrifying but we don’t see it until much later in the movie. I’d highly recommend “Godzilla” for any movie enthusiasts. It was my first time seeing it and I have nothing but admiration and appreciation for the fact that it was actually made and that it also inspired one of cinema’s biggest movie giants, Mr. Spielberg, who, in turn, inspired me to start making movies at age 12.
In select theaters May 9th including the Angelika Dallas
