Rating: NR
Genre:
Science Fiction
Release Date: 09/22/2009
SubTitles: English
Dubbed: English
Sound: DD
Run Time: 98 min
Flags: Violence, Questionable for Children
Distributor/Studio: Classic Media
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
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
;)
