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Verbal Diorama

Godzilla (Gojira ゴジラ) (1954)

June 25 · 52 min · Season 8 · Episode 348 · 127.2 MB
0:00-52:59

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In the spring of 1954, a Japanese fishing vessel called the Lucky Dragon No. 5 sailed into the fallout zone of an American hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Its crew came home irradiated, and Japan, a nation still raw from Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a decade earlier, found itself confronting nuclear terror all over again.

Within months, Toho producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, with a collapsed co-production and an empty budget to fill, conceived a monster movie. What emerged from that collision of commercial necessity and national grief was Gojira (aka Godzilla); a film in which director Ishirō Honda, effects genius Eiji Tsuburaya, and a nation's unspoken anguish combined to create something cinema had never quite seen before. The character of Godzilla has evolved over 70 years, embodying contemporary fears and anxieties in a uniquely artistic way.

Godzilla was never simply a creature feature. Honda had walked through the ruins of Hiroshima after the war. When his monster surfaced from the Pacific, awakened and mutated by nuclear testing, and reduced Tokyo to ash and radiation, Japanese audiences weren't watching spectacle. They were watching their own grief and trauma on screen. The hospital scenes, the Geiger counters, the dying children: all of it was modelled on the aftermath of atomic destruction. Even the film's resolution; Dr Serizawa destroying his world-ending weapon and himself along with it, posed a moral question about nuclear responsibility that no Western movie of the era came close to asking.

As long as countries continue to test and threat with nuclear weapons, as long as that threat persists, so does Godzilla, as a warning to humanity.

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