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It’s interesting to revisit this seminal franchise starter that sparked a decades-long, international fascination—not to mention a whole genre—and see that it’s narratively pretty humdrum, at least in retrospect.
Maybe it shocked audiences at the time with the audacity of depicting the wholesale, wanton destruction of Tokyo at the hands of a previously unimagined, mutated dinosaur-like creature. That scale of cataclysmic horror was something new to screens at the time, and it’s easy to see how it might have been a disturbing sensation. But after so much technological progress in FX, Ishirō Honda’s film now looks more interesting as a time capsule of remarkably detailed miniature work—and commendably clever strategies for how to light a man in a rubber lizard costume.
The rest of the film, though, is pretty underwhelming. None of the principal human characters are all that remarkable, not even the scientist played by the immortal Takashi Shimura, who brings his iconic, hangdog expressiveness to the weird role of a scientist dejected by society’s lack of interest in not killing a gigantic lizard creature who’s murdering countless Japanese citizens. Like that one, none of the other human conflicts really lead anywhere. What’s more, the deus ex machina that finally defeats Godzilla is almost flagrantly uninspiring. In fact, I bet that the percentage of people worldwide who are familiar with Godzilla and who also know how he was overcome in his very first movie is probably in the low single digits, if that. It’s a good example of how a character (I guess Godzilla is a character?) can become iconic even if the film that launches him is nothing particularly special.
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