It is probably a consequence of the long series of entertaining and likeable spinoffs, which turned the atomic dinosaur into a series which became a veritable institution, that people often overlook how dark and emotionally fraught the original 1954 film was (let’s pretend for a moment that Roland Emmerich’s version never existed). I don’t want to put anyone off, but Gojira is a serious film. Its DNA is as complex as that of the average Italian. This much is clear from its name, Gojira, a fusion of “gorilla” and “kujira” (Japanese for whale) – even if legend has it that it was actually the friendly nickname for an overweight employee of the Toho studios. Its ancestors can be traced back to King Kong and other giant creatures from Hollywood, as well as to specifically Japanese mythology. However, there is no mistaking its immediate source: Godzilla (the film and the creature) is a product of the atomic bomb.
Its production was undoubtedly the result of a shrewd study of the market (although it remained a big gamble: it cost ten times as much as the average Japanese film of the period), but this fact does not detract from the painful urgency of the undertaking. In 1946, Ishiro Honda visited Hiroshima and one gets the impression that Gojira was his way of conveying its horror, without simply coming to terms with it. The critic José Maria Latorre has rightly underlined the film’s disturbing combination of a raw documentary aesthetic with a resolutely unheroic war film. Indeed, the version immediately revised, reworked and repackaged by Joseph E. Levine for the American market (under the title Godzilla, King of the Monsters!) went to great lengths to sanitise the film’s mood, leaving the most uncomfortable references to the madness of the nuclear age on the cutting-room floor.
The most unforgettable character in the film, aside from the monster, is Dr. Serizawa, who unwittingly discovers a device that destroys oxygen (today we would call it an “oxygen depletion system” that got out of hand). His torment when faced with the deadly symbiosis between science and mass destruction remains, in my view, more convincing than the one displayed by Oppenheimer in Nolan’s excellent film.

Andrea Meneghelli