One of the longest-running series in film history began with Ishiro Honda's grim, black-and-white allegory for the devastation wrought on Japan by the atomic bomb. As his visual metaphor, Honda uses a 400-foot-tall mutant dinosaur called Gojira, awakened from the depths of the sea as a rampaging nuclear nightmare, complete with glowing dorsal fins and fiery, radioactive breath. Crushing ships, villages, and buildings in his wake, Gojira marches toward Tokyo, bringing all of the country's worst nightmares back until an evil more terrible bomb -- capable of sucking all the oxygen from the sea -- returns the monster to its watery grave. The original film is chilling, despite some rather unconvincing man-in-a-suit special effects, and brimming with explicitly stated anti-American sentiment. All of that was removed for the U.S. release directed by Terry Morse. It was replaced with bad dubbing and tedious added footage starring Raymond Burr. The resulting edit was just another monster movie, but was still popular enough to assure future Toho Studios monster films a wide American release. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
Review
While you might have a hard time convincing most people, Inoshiro Honda's Gojira -- the film whose success launched the long-running Godzilla series and helped to make Japanese monster movies one of the nation's best known exports -- is actually an intelligent and somber parable about the legacy and consequences of the atomic bomb, told from the perspective of a people who had witnessed its impact firsthand only nine years earlier. Unfortunately, the film's serious intentions are muffled in the American release version, which has not only been dubbed and re-edited, but features new footage of Raymond Burr as American newsman Steve Martin (a name that started getting laughs of its own about 22 years after the film arrived in the States), acting alongside a handful of Asian extras who keep popping up in increasingly surreal contexts. While the U.S. cut still holds on to some of the original's dark tone, it mostly trivializes a film that deserves better; while still a low-budget monster movie, Honda's original Gojira manages to convey a genuine respect for the gravity of the issues it raises (leaving little doubt that its fire-breathing monster is, in this context, a stand-in for the bombs which leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki), as well as a compassion for both the victims and the emotionally wounded people who left scars upon their nation while fighting the menace. If the opportunity to see Honda's original Japanese-language version of Gojira presents itself, it's a simple but powerful work well worth your time, while the Americanized cut manages to save the cut-rate spectacle but leave out what gave the original film its resonance. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Cast
Akihiko Hirata - Daisuke Serizawa; Momoko Kochi - Emiko Yamane; Kokuten Kodo - Gisaku, Oto Island Patriarch; Haruo Nakajima - Newspaper Employee (Japanese version only)/Power Subs; Kenji Sahara - Man aboard Ship; Sachio Sakai - Hagiwara; Takashi Shimura - Dr. Kyohei Yamane; Kin Sugai - Miss Ozawa, member of Parliament; Akira Takarada - Hideto Ogata; Fuyuki Murakami - Dr. Tabata; Toranosuke Ogawa - President of Shipping Company; Katsumi Tezuka - Hagiwara's Editor (Japanese version only)/Gojira; Ren Yamamoto - Sieji
Credit
Ishiro Honda - Director, Akira Ifukube - Composer (Music Score), Tomoyuki Tanaka - Producer, Eiji Tsuburaya - Special Effects, Akira Watanabe - Special Effects, Hiroshi Mukoyama - Special Effects, Kuichiro Kishida - Special Effects, Hisashi Shimogawa - Sound/Sound Designer, Ishiro Honda - Screenwriter, Takeo Murata - Screenwriter, Shigeru Kayama - Short Story Author
