There are two kinds of people in this world: those that love Godzilla because he’s a
man in a rubber suit punching other men in rubber suits while destroying a city made of toys
and those that love Godzilla because he’s a symbol of a natural world
ravaged by the nuclear sins of mankind.
I'm Rafa, and I guess you could say I'm the second kind of person...mostly.
So far, there have been 27 Godzilla films that embody what the first kind of person loves about
the big guy...
...you know, not counting whatever Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla was supposed to be.
[Niko] Wrong floor.
[Rafa] But the second kind of person really only had one movie to watch — the original Gojira,
released in 1954.
That is, until Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot.
Which isn’t to say that it’s in any way equal to the original masterpiece, just that
this new film has a lot more in common with Gojira than it does gleefully corny movies
like Destroy All Monsters.
To understand why, we need to go back half a century to consider the circumstances of
the franchise’s birth.
In 1954, Japan was just nine years removed from the catastrophic horror of the atomic
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Until 1952, the Japanese people had been living under an American military occupation that
censored any media discussion about those attacks and restricted any depictions of Japanese
military power, along with anything that was critical of or reflected poorly upon the occupation.
But by the time this film was made, those restrictions were gone, and the Japanese military
was being rebuilt as the Japan Self-Defense Forces.
It was a time when the nation was birthing anew from the ashes of the Second World War
as a democratic, peaceful society, but the wounds were still fresh in the minds of its citizens.
Which is why the incident with the Lucky Dragon Number 5 was so significant.
The Lucky Dragon was a Japanese fishing boat that was caught in the radioactive ash from
an American nuclear test in Bikini Atoll, despite being outside the danger zone established
by the United States government.
All 23 crew members suffered from Acute Radiation Syndrome, and one of the men eventually died.
Concern about nuclear weapons was suddenly at the forefront of the Japanese consciousness,
all the more so because the majority of the populace had lived through the horrors of
the atom bomb.
Six months later, the opening scene of Gojira:
Audiences were treated to a giant dragon spewing radioactive breath and laying waste to Tokyo,
its skin covered in tumors that looked like the keloid scars of the atom bomb’s victims.
These images of urban holocaust and hospitals overflowing with the dying hit pretty close
to home, and these scenes of the Japanese military flexing their muscles were nothing
less of extraordinary.
The first film was essentially the founding of a therapeutic franchise, beginning with
a startlingly direct and harrowing confrontation of immediate and powerful fears
and quickly morphing into a more escapist family-friendly series where the embodiment
of fear turned into Japan’s noble protector.
No longer an awe-inspiring, implacable force of a vengeful Earth, Godzilla became, well…kind
of adorable.
Fifty years later, one can clearly trace the lineage of Edwards’ reboot as a direct descendant
of Gojira.
In place of the fishing boat and it’s topical significance regarding fears of a nuclear
arms race, there is a contemporary analogue that references the nuclear power plant disasters
of Fukushima and Chernobyl.
The overflowing hospitals are replaced with images of disaster relief we’re more familiar
with — especially for American audiences.
FEMA workers, football stadiums teeming with refugees, firefighters as first responders
— all these images evoke immediate associations with events like Katrina and 9/11, not just because
of their content, but because their presentation mirrors the televised iconography we now associate
with such events.
The radio newsman breathlessly broadcasting the unfathomable disaster to rapt audiences
in Gojira is supplanted with network news that is easily ignored by people who’ve
learned to tune out the endless barrage of horrific images that make up the 24 hour news cycle
But most importantly, Edwards treats Godzilla and the M.U.T.O.s with the same reverence
as the original film.
Every shot emphasizes their size, their power, their otherworldly majesty.
Edwards displays a Spielbergian delight in teasing our eyes and stoking our anticipation,
manipulating our sense of awe with simple elegance.
In this famous sequence, Spielberg puts on a master class in cinematic foreplay.
The act of looking becomes drawn out and exaggerated, while the object of attention is deliberately
withheld.
Characters need to keep modifying their point of view — standing up, removing glasses
— which communicates to the audience that these people can’t quite believe what they’re seeing.
And when we finally do see it, still the camera delays revealing its totality.
While these tricks have certainly been aped by other filmmakers, sometimes in ways that
feel a bit sarcastic...
...few manage to evoke that indescribable sense of wonder.
But Edwards, at least in my opinion, has done exactly that.
Aside from the Spielbergian flair,
part of the reason this works so well is that, as in the original film, our perspective is
almost entirely placed at the level of the human eye, whether on the ground, at sea,
or in the air.
The audience and the characters in the film both become helpless bystanders.
In fact, the few things humanity does attempt fail miserably and even backfire, making the
situation worse. [Rando] But if we rig a nuclear warhead with a shielded timer,
put it on a boat and send it 20 miles out, the radiation lures the M.U.T.O.s,
and the M.U.T.O.s lure Godzilla. [Other Rando] And we detonate, with minimal fallout risk to the city.
Again, this is another ancestral thread from Honda’s film.
With one key exception, which we’ll get to in a moment, the characters in both films
discover that all avenues of human agency are useless.
Neither film has a true protagonist. The original Dr. Serizawa, who is the only character
in either film to resolve the plot, makes his first appearance 37 minutes into the film,
and is then ignored until the third act. Even Brody, despite his increasingly providential
involvement with the plot and his heroic efforts, doesn’t manage to satisfy the requirements
of protagonism.
There is no inner conflict that is addressed and then resolved, or any personal growth
whatsoever, and the external objective — defeat the monsters — is one he fails to achieve.
But here is where the films begin to diverge.
Gojira's message is pretty clear.
Humanity’s meddling with nuclear power led directly to the creation of the monster, and
the subsequent holocaust is clearly the fault of mankind.
Godzilla’s scarred skin and evident rage is not just frightening, but haunting.
Godzilla is a victim of humanity’s weapon lust, and the film’s emotional complexity
comes from a clear desire on the part of the filmmakers to empathize not just with the
helpless civilians, but also with the monster.
Dr. Yamane is the focal point of this conflict, torn by his scientific desire
to understand this enigmatic and tortured creature and the need to save his countrymen
from annihilation.
Dr. Serizawa, the Oppenheimer-esque figure of the film, is the man who holds the key
to Japan’s salvation, but he too is burdened with a moral dilemma.
He accidentally created a super weapon, and is gripped by the fear that using it to kill
Godzilla will lead to a terrible arms race.
His solution is to use the weapon but sacrifice himself, taking its secrets to his grave.
The ending is tragic, for Godzilla, Serizawa, and humanity as a whole.
Salvation was bought at a great moral cost, and there’s no guarantee that it is permanent.
In contrast, the central message in Edward’s film is…well, a bit messier.
Fears of a nuclear armageddon have pretty much faded entirely.
If the world could still be said to have a number one fear, it’s probably global warming
and environmental collapse, and the film reflects that changing landscape.
Much of the destruction we see on screen has the flavor of a natural or environmental disaster:
earthquakes, tsunamis, radioactive waste.
And the monsters, these ancient creatures from a primordial age, are awakened not by
human weapons tests, but by a series of human assaults upon the natural world: mining for
precious metals, harnessing nuclear reactions, creating and storing radioactive waste.
The original sin is no longer just nuclear weapons, but a broader set of human behaviors
from which we can’t easily abstain.
The M.U.T.O.s take on the role of vengeful spirits, and Godzilla assumes the role of
the custodian and protector of earth, as he did in the sequels to the original film, restoring
balance to the world.
As for the scientists, while they are tortured, in a sense, their problems are frankly far
less interesting than their counterparts in Gojira.
Dr. Brody is haunted by the death of his wife and seeks to uncover The Truth, but is entirely
unaffected by any ethical dilemma – except, of course, the one that killed his wife.
And this iteration of Dr. Serizawa has no superweapon to weigh upon his soul, just this watch.
[Stenz] It's stopped. [Serizawa] Yes. 8:15 in the morning. August 6th. 1945.
[Stenz] Hiroshima. [Serizawa] It was my father's.
That little speech exists to help us understand why he opposes nukes being deployed on the
monsters, but really, not wanting a nuke to go off is pretty standard fare for good guys
in movies these days, and doesn’t carry the same weight as his cinematic ancestor’s
plight did to audiences in the fifties.
Still, the message comes across regardless.
Our technology, our interference with the natural world, has brought an apocalypse upon
ourselves that we simply cannot stop by interfering further.
In fact, that can only make things worse.
Humanity’s great plan to save the planet with a bomb backfired so badly it nearly became
a catastrophe.
Instead, salvation can only come from allowing nature to sort itself out.
Or, as Dr. Serizawa puts it: "The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way around.
Let them fight."
Curiously, all this results in a film that is both more bleak and more optimistic than
the original.
More bleak because, while Dr. Serizawa detonates a superweapon and saves Japan, Ford attempts
to prevent a detonation and fails, just barely getting it far enough offshore to keep it
from annihilating what’s left of San Francisco.
Point being, there’s not much we can do to save ourselves.
However, and here’s the optimistic bit, there is hope as long as Godzilla lives.
Compare that to the original, where the secrets of the weapon that saved the day died with
Serizawa.
Should another terror from the deep arise, what then?
What could possibly save us?
And what kind of world do we live in now?
Those questions were ultimately answered in really silly ways, of course,
but on it’s
Gojira was equally interested in provoking thought as it was in providing spectacle,
and Godzilla also aspires to being something more than pure escapism, distancing itself
from the cheese typical of the genre even as it borrows some of its monster-wrestling
elements.
Their final shots, almost identical to one another, perfectly encapsulate the connection
and the evolution between these two films.
While Ishiro Honda looks upon the surface of the ocean with unease and Gareth Edwards
with hope, both invite us to gaze beyond this border between our world and the unknown,
and wonder.
Thanks for watching, guys. Please let me know what you think in the comments, and if you liked what you saw
you might want to check out my other video and subscribe to the channel.
I'm trying to keep my release schedule as regular as my bowel movements,
and hopefully, the comparisons between the two end there.