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*with spoilers*
When I was a kid, I watched a lot of Godzilla movies with my dad. It was always Godzilla vs[some kind of fucking space alien or something, or a giant moth]. But I had never seen the original prototypical Godzilla movie, the Ishiro Honda film from 1954. And having now finally seen it in the Criterion release, my first reaction is: damn, I don�t remember Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla being so relentlessly dark and depressing.One has heard before, �You know, Godzilla addresses the nuclear dread that afflicted Japan following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the hydrogen bomb tests, including �Castle Bravo,� which coated the Japanese fishing vessel Fukuryu Maru with nuclear fall-out� (we at Say a Prayer for the Octopus have discussed these events before). But what�s striking about Godzilla is the extent to which they foreground the nuclear issue. It does not constitute the film�s subtext, but is rather its main theme. As the scientist Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura, who apparently made non-Kurosawa movies) says, �Godzilla was baptized in the fire of the H-bomb.� And that�s how the Japan Self-Defense Forces track Godzilla in the movie: with a Geiger-counter, because the poor dinosaur is radioactive.
Furthermore, Godzilla descends upon Japan like the American Air Force, and it is noteworthy that he doesn�t just smash Tokyo, he uses his fire breath to engulf it in flames. So Ishiro Honda has used Godzilla to restage the apocalyptic firebombing of Tokyo by the American Air Force in the latter stages of World War II. I am reluctant to seek out a one-to-one allegorical equivalency, but it seems that Godzilla, at least in relation to Tokyo, is American General Curtis LeMay, who directed the bombing of Japanese cities (you may recall Robert McNamara recounting an anecdote in Errol Morris�s The Fog of War about LeMay saying after the war, �You know, had we lost the war, you and I would be on trial for war crimes.� No shit.)
Finally, I�d like to call attention to the remarkably tragic love triangle at the center of the extra-dinosaurial plot in this movie. A pretty young woman named Emiko (daughter of the paleontologist played by Takashi Shimura) is divided between her burgeoning love for the handsome Ogata, and her older loyalties to the brooding scientist Serizawa (who lost an eye in the war; an eye-patch always adds extra gravitas), who resolves the conflict by wishing happiness to Emiko and Ogata and then committing suicide. No one commits suicide in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Honda�s original Godzilla is an altogether different movie, dark and tragic and radioactive.
