The original Japanese super-dragon is back, for the first time in the USA in an improved Toho remaster that restores the awesome majesty of Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya’s overachieving Kaiju fantasy. The 500-foot leviathan’s debut feature will be a surprise for folk expecting him to scrap with Mothra or dance a jig on the Moon: just 9 years after Japan became the first atomic-age target, the somber horror fantasy reopened an un-healed national wound. Also included is the U.S. recut we’ve all seen 100 times, that re-frames the story through American eyes. It’s Hollywood’s most successful re-shoot & re-edit revision job.
Godzilla 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 594
1954 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 96 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 5, 2024 / 49.95
Starring: Akira Takarada, Momoko Kôchi, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura, Fuyuki Murakami, Sachio Sakai.
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production Design/Art Direction: Satoshi Chuko, Takeo Kitaer:
Director Special Visual Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya
Film Editor: Yasunobu Taira
Original Music: Akira Ifukube
Screenplay Written by Ishirô Honda, Shigeru Kayama, Takeo Murata
Produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka
Directed by Ishirô Honda
After seventy years of sequels that reinvented the ‘Unstoppable Titan of Terror!’ as everything from a friend of children to a defender of the planet, the radioactive monster Godzilla made a sensational comeback last year in Godzilla Minus One. We covered its remarkable theatrical success in several CineSavant columns: July 15 ’23, September 5 ’23, December 5 ’23, March 9 ’24. It was so popular, it was reissued in a reworked B&W version.
The new picture enhanced the reputation of the original 1954 movie that started all the fuss. It was the late 1980s before most American fans could see the very different original Japanese version Gojira, which didn’t star Raymond Burr and wasn’t told from an American point of view. Criterion released a decent Blu-ray of Gojira in 2012, and now gives us a 4K Ultra HD upgrade using a new, much improved Toho restoration-remaster.
We knew Godzilla from our childhood as Godzilla King of the Monsters, on 14-inch TV screens. * When we were old enough to hear about the war and the Bomb, the TV viewings raised a lot of questions. Why would the only country ever to suffer nuclear attacks produce a fantasy thriller about their national trauma? We didn’t know that our American version of the movie shifted the film’s focus away from social comment, to straight spectacle.
This original Japanese-language Gojira leans much more heavily on human issues and post-atomic moral questions. Other Japanese films that had dramatized the bombings, such as 1953’s Hiroshima, were not popular. Gojira put its real terrors at a fictional remove, in the form of the ‘giant monster’ movies then making a Hollywood comeback.
The story is pitched at a sober adult level, beginning with a deadly incident at sea. Japanese sailors are irradiated and their ship sunk by an unknown flash of light and heat; then more vessels are destroyed. Searching for the cause, scientist Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) travels to the tiny island of Odo, and is confronted by a colossal water dragon. It soon comes ashore in Tokyo, leaving a broad wake of death and destruction. Conventional weapons prove useless, which puts the mysterious, secretive Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) in a bind. He has perfected a terrible weapon called an ‘Oxygen Destroyer’ but feels morally compromised and refuses to use it against the monster. He argues that if the device’s existence is revealed, governments will rush to exploit it as another weapon of mass destruction. Serizawa’s fiancée Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kôchi) begs him to reconsider — innocent civilians are dying.
Unlike some science fiction fantasies, Gojira has a human connection to engage mainstream audiences. A romantic triangle is orchestrated along familiar lines. Scientist Yamane’s beautiful daughter Emiko (we love Momoko Kôchi’s endearing, Gene Tierney-like overbite) is in love with Akira Takarada’s handsome young salvage operator. But she’s technically engaged to Dr. Yamane, a morbidly-obsessed scientist who does bad things to goldfish in his Rotwang-like mad lab.
Director Ishiro Honda balances the personal drama with a wider communal consciousness. The general population subsists as best they can under a new atomic threat. A woman on a bus says that she narrowly escaped Nagasaki, “and now this!” The people affected by the closing of the shipping lanes complain loudly to the authorities. In the Diet, politicos try to downplay the crisis so as not to offend the Americans. That ignites a fierce protest from a female representative: “The truth is the truth!”
Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka may have been inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but the movies’ approaches to special effects are very different. Toho’s resourceful technicians found clever ways to combine their rubber Man-in-suit-a-saur with live action and impressive miniatures. Audiences everywhere were impressed by the images of Godzilla crushing Tokyo underfoot. What he doesn’t flatten, he sets on fire with his breath, irradiating everything with Strontium-90. Toho’s first sequel came right away, upping the stakes with a two-monster championship bout. Later sequels tamed and expanded the franchise, adding new monsters for a series of increasingly juvenile epics. But every schoolchild of the ’60s still knew that Godzilla was a symbolic substitute for The Bomb.
Splitting Atoms, or Splitting Hairs?
The movie was made soon after the end of the American occupation. Japanese films were no longer subject to harsh U.S. Army censorship, yet routinely deferred to their new postwar allies. How could a Japanese film company make such a self-flagellating spectacle? Critic Tadao Sato suggests that the vision of Tokyo once again in flames allowed Japanese audiences to deal with the communal guilt still felt over the war.
It is interesting to note that Gojira does not demonize the U.S., or directly imply that the monster represents America. Godzilla is stylized as a new force of nature, a dragon that breathes Atomic fire. The arms-length remove of fantasy allows viewers to infer what they will.
The wartime nuclear bombings were still spoken of in hushed tones, but the Japanese couldn’t miss one salient topical reference in Gojira, a direct allusion to the recent, controversial Lucky Dragon 5 incident. A Japanese tuna boat was irradiated by fallout from the Bikini Atoll Hydrogen bomb test. Critic David Kalat’s commentary maintains that the film is passive-aggressive anti-American. But by 1954 two other nations were testing atom bombs. Gojira’s text decries nuclear destruction but doesn’t openly blame any individual country, not even the United States.
The radioactive horror-beast is instead repeatedly allied with ‘science run amok.’ The film’s messages charge nuclear scientists with a moral responsibility to prevent the misuse of their discoveries by politicians and militarists. For a pacifist statement, the movie exonerates Dr. Serizawa, and makes a big deal of his (very Japanese) noble sacrifice to benefit mankind. But not even Robert Oppenheimer could come up with a responsible way to resolve the cloudy moral issue of the bomb.
Daisuke Serizawa’s solution to the dilemma satisfies sentimentally, and not much more. His ‘Oxygen Destroyer’ appears to be some kind of matter-disintegrating technology. If he’s so intent on its peaceful uses, why has he fabricated a plug-and-play practical weapon? Serizawa determines that his super-weapon will have this one monster-dissolving trial, and then be lost forever. That’s nonsense, as other scientists will find his secret soon enough. A genie set loose can’t be put back in the bottle, but a bottled genie will always find a way to get out.
Dr. Yamane ends by wondering, ‘gee, what if another Godzilla comes?’ Should that happen, it’s a safe bet that everybody will want to reverse-engineer an Oxygen Destroyer, post haste.
A giant mass of National Guilt, Anger, Frustration and Fear.
Gojira is given a prehistoric origin, complete with the evidence of extinct Trilobites. But the monster’s symbolic function gives him a special distinction: he’s a semi-mythic cultural fantasy. ‘Mother Nature’ betrayed by transgressive science, perhaps? He rises from the sea not to eat or spawn, but for the express purpose of trashing The Things Of Man. Is Godzilla is a post-modern version of a traditional Yokai demon, writ large? Note his skin, which is not reptilian-scaly, but a billowing indistinct mass. His visual appearance is that of a walking atomic mushroom cloud.
The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Godzilla is here, and we don’t mind saying that it’s about time. Around 2010 or 2011 we were at the house of a local writer, a well-known published authority on Japanese fantasy and kaiju in particular. He then showed us a new, improved Japanese Blu-ray of Godzilla. It was indeed far better-looking than anything we knew, but it had no English subtitles. Soon thereafter, Criterion released its fancy 2012 Blu-ray edition. We were very disappointed to find that it was not Toho’s improved transfer, but a good HD scan of the same contrasty, down-generation source we already knew well.
The new 2024 4K digital restoration by Toho is a beauty. The entire movie is sharper, with a better contrast range. The image is rock-steady, and splices no longer ‘ride;’ white specks and dirt are gone. Toho’s source element was a 35mm printing master, presumably one generation away from the original negative.
The only time the old flaws appear is during some dissolves — which may have had optical registration problems when the film was new … lap dissolves in the same year’s Seven Samurai do the same thing. A naval exercise sequence is composed of finely-scratched stock shots, which are left un-revised.
The show must have 150 complicated effects shots.
Seen in this rejuvenated, extra-clear presentation, Eiji Tsuburaya’s special effects look better than ever. Rear projection scenes still exhibit some fluctuation, but not as badly as before. The split screens in Eiji Tsuburaya’s visual effects still ‘wiggle’ somewhat, because the cameras were not pin-registered. Hand-rotoscoped mattes are employed to composite the beast into numerous shots. Stop-motion animation also sees some use. What’s most impressive is the depth of focus maintained on the miniatures, even with the camera rolling at four-times speed.
The remastered audio gives the soundtrack more punch. Akira Ikufube’s great film score has several very memorable themes; the main theme for Gojira enhances the feeling of vast power, and goes well with the monster’s deafening footfalls and distinctive roar. It sounds like metal screaming in a blast furnace.
The American Godzilla, King of the Monsters is in HD and only on the second Blu-ray disc. Criterion’s copy includes original ‘Trans-World’ end credits, taken from a 1956 theatrical print owned by the late film collector Michael Hyatt. The King of the Monsters recut is the version we knew for 40 years; its American distributors included Joseph E. Levine. Director Terry Morse skillfully shoehorned additional scenes with Raymond Burr into the narrative; rather than a pastiche, his reworked version is well-written and cleverly assembled. Burr’s fly-on-the-wall reporter narrates the movie from within a newly imposed flashback structure. We are told that the King of the Monsters re-cut was also distributed in Japan!
The video extras are the same selection assembled in 2012 by Criterion disc producer Curtis Tsui. Author David Kalat provides an impassioned commentary for each feature version. He explains what the original Gojira represented for Japanese audiences, and examines the strange cultural re-mix of the American version.
Critic Tadao Sato explains some of the political context of the time and offers his personal analysis of Japan’s monster-who-became-a-friend. Other interviews give us input from the beloved composer Akira Ifukube, actors Akira Takarada and Haruo Nakajima, the man who played Godzilla inside the rubber suit. Two effects technicians also comment, but an effects-oriented featurette has only a few examples to offer. Much better is a piece about the terrible fate of the sailors of the Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon 5.
Trailers for both movies are included. The narration script for the King of the Monsters trailer is an uninterrupted tirade of hyperbole, that must have left schoolboys in 1956 with their mouths hanging open:
Criterion also repeats its packaging, with the terrific Bill Sienkiewicz key art on the cover. It ought to be released as a poster, but we’d guess that Toho wouldn’t approve. The folding disc holder once again opens up like a pop-up book, to display a fiery image of ‘Big G’ in all his glory — an image of the beast from a later film. He looks different in almost every new sequel.
What with the surprise critical success of the 2023 Godzilla Minus One, interest in the franchise is at an all-time high. We’d suspect that this new disc has no new extras simply because Toho is so difficult to deal with, but it’s a shame that Minus One’s director Takashi Yamazaki couldn’t be tapped for a fresh perspective on the original Gojira. As a cultural symbol and a world-wide icon, the monster is once again a symbolic demon from the ghost-subconscious, the Stuff that Atomic Nightmares are Made Of.
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Godzilla 4K
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentaries for both movies by David Kalat
Interviews:
with actors Akira Takarada and Haruo Nakajima
with special effects technicians Yoshio Irie and Eizo Kaimai
with composer Akira Ifukube
with critic Tadao Sato
Featurettes:
on the film’s visual effects, with Koichi Kawakita and Motoyoshi Tomioka
The Unluckiest Dragon, an illustrated audio essay featuring historian Greg Pflugfelder describing the tragic fate of the fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryu Maru, a real-life event that inspired Godzilla.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD and 1 Blu-ray disc in card and plastic holder in box sleeve
Reviewed: November 7, 2024
(7225godz)
* In my personal case, I only saw the main titles and heard the stomping footprints before my parents decided it was too scary and changed the channel.
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