Godzilla Minus One: What is Godzilla Part One

Godzilla Minus One is a film I am very excited about, I'm sure this is not surprising in the least. It is, of course, the latest film in the Godzilla franchise, once again being produced by Toho, but this film is different from the rest in two key areas; one, it's a period piece, set in Japan in 1947, and two, it's getting a theatrical release in the UK, something no Japanese Godzilla film has had in my entire life. With my tickets booked, this will be the first time in my life that I'll watch a Japanese Godzilla film in cinemas, which is a big deal for me. Though the film is already out in Japan and isn't coming out in the UK until the 15th of December, I'm doing my best to keep away from any potential spoilers or leaks. Instead of looking for that shit, I'm doing homework, I plan to watch the original Godzilla at some point in the coming weeks, and with Armistice Day having just gone and me going back down the rabbit hole of War documentaries, I figured I'd get a bit versed on the kind of world Godzilla Minus One will be set in. And over the past few years, a lot of people in my personal life have asked me just what the deal is with Godzilla, why do I care so much about a guy dressed up as a dinosaur wrecking cardboard and plywood cities, the answer I give them is that it's complicated, so let's dig into that question.

Our digging begins on the 7th of December, 1941, when Japan launched a surprise attack on the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, it's one of the most dramatic and famous events in history, in which two and a half thousand people were killed. The formerly isolationist United States would take centre stage over the coming years, helping the British break back into continental Europe and defeat the Nazis, and rolling back Japan's imperial expansions in the Pacific. A quote attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after Pearl Harbour reads; "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." The fighting in the Pacific was some of the most brutal of the entire war, as a vengeful America was forced to dig out the fearless and relentless Japanese forces across the Pacific. What a lot of people don't really appreciate about the Pacific war is just how hard the Japanese went for it and just how fanatical and downright suicidal they became as the war dragged on. Like the Nazis, the Imperial Japanese were a bit nuts; both took Nationalism to its absolute extreme; believing wholly in the superiority of their nations and races over others, and believing that the lesser nations and the lesser races deserved retribution for mistreating and betraying their great nations. By the start of the 1940's Japan had turned into a militarist state led by the son of a Samurai, a nation that knew war was coming and thought it could win if it went for the throat, attempting to wipe out the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbour. 

But like the Nazis in Germany, the Imperial Japanese severely underestimated their enemy’s resolve, and by the start of 1945, as the Americans were invading Okinawa and B29 Bombers were raining hellfire on Tokyo, the Japanese became more desperate and more determined than ever to end the war on their own terms. On Saipan; soldiers and civilians alike threw themselves and their families off the cliffs to evade capture by the Americans, many civilians were taken into caves by the soldiers, ultimately being burned or buried alive by the Americans when they refused to come out. On the Japanese Home Islands, preparations were being made for an American invasion, school kids were being trained to use guns and spears, and being shown to get under American tanks and blow themselves up to destroy them. And then there are the infamous Kamikazes; inexperienced, untrained pilots, many of whom teenagers, sent out in modified fighter planes to act as human missiles. Towards the end of the war, Japan's options were death or surrender, and the military government and by extension, the entire country, had chosen death. Then Hiroshima happened. America had built and tested the first Atomic Bomb and used it twice in the most dramatic and horrific end to a war in history. On the 6th of August 1945, between eighty thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand people were killed, some were instantly vaporised by the fireball, many that survived the initial blast died later from severe burns and radiation poisoning, tens of thousands of lives ended in less than a second. Then it happened again on the 9th, as America dropped a second Bomb on Nagasaki, killing another eighty thousand people. 

Less than a week later on the 15th of August, Emperor Hirohito forced the hand of the Japanese military government and announced the surrender via public radio broadcast. World War II remains the only time in history that an Atomic Bomb was used as a weapon of war, and Japan remains the only country it was ever used on. Unfortunately, we're not finished with this depressing history lecture, skipping ahead to March of 1954, the fishing boat Daigo Fukuryu Maru, the Lucky Dragon No.5, returned to port in Japan, her twenty-three-man crew were all suffering from acute radiation sickness. On the 1st of March on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, America detonated its first Thermonuclear Fusion Bomb; Castle Bravo, the Bomb was far more efficient and powerful than predicted, and the resulting fallout irradiated many of the surrounding islands and several civilian vessels outside of the projected danger zone, including the Lucky Dragon No.5. The nearby Rongelap Atoll was badly hit, being evacuated two days after the test when many of its residents began to show symptoms of radiation poisoning, in the following years, the rate of stillbirths and miscarriages on Rongelap would reach double that of the United States. The fallout of Castle Bravo wasn't just of the radioactive kind though, Japan was outraged at what had happened, and across the globe, a growing antinuclear sentiment began to reach fever pitch. This was only five years after the Soviet Union tested their first Atomic Bomb, and nine years after America dropped two of them on Japan, the true potential of the Atomic Bomb was very well understood and rightly feared, especially now that the Soviets had them, the Cold War had begun and the existential threat faced by Japan in the summer of 1945 had gone global.

 It was in this era of intense nuclear anxiety that Japanese film company, Toho, who wanted their own successful giant monster movie like 1933's King Kong and 1953's The Beast from 20'000 Fathoms, would make film history. On the 3rd of November 1954, they would release a film that perfectly captured this anxiety, and the terror brought upon their nation by the Bomb, a film that opened with a small ship being destroyed by a blast of radiation. That film was Godzilla, directed by Ishiro Honda and produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka, and featured the titular giant monster, awoken from its slumber by Atomic testing in the Pacific, coming ashore and destroying and irradiating Tokyo. I reviewed the original Godzilla a few years ago, and if you know Godzilla for the epic sci fi blockbusters they are today, or the campy, goofy monster mashes of the 60's and 70's, the original Godzilla will come as a bit of a shock to you. It's not campy or goofy, nor is it epic or exciting; it's depressing, its dark, its ugly, it leaves you with tears in your eyes and a stone in your stomach. It's a film where a Geiger counter ticks when pointed at a child's face, where a mother dies in front of her kid and the kid can do nothing but sit there and scream, the only moment in any film I've ever watched that made me sob. Godzilla wasn't a film that indulged in destruction for its own sake, at its heart, it was a film about suffering; the suffering of a nation and its people, and of the horror and cruelty of war and Atomic weapons. Much of the film's imagery directly mirrors the images of what was left of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and like those Bombings and the Lucky Dragon No.5 earlier that year, the events of the film didn't stop with the destroyed city, but with people being poisoned by the power of the Atom, dying slowly from an invisible killer unleashed by the monster. 

Then there was Serizawa, the character in the film that kills Godzilla using a superweapon he invented, the Oxygen Destroyer. In the film, Serizawa, after agreeing to use his superweapon against Godzilla, destroys all of his research into the weapon, and then decides to die with Godzilla, taking the secrets of the Oxygen Destroyer to his grave. There are obvious parallels with the Oxygen Destroyer and the Atomic Bomb, both are breakthroughs in science that never had time to be fully understood before being deployed as a weapon of war, both are superweapons that can kill millions of people in the blink of an eye. And Serizawa, a man with a dark past and an eye patch, knows what such a weapon looks like in action, and decides to kill himself to protect the world from it. The film ends on a warning by Dr. Yamane that more monsters could be out there, and that continued Nuclear testing could wake them up. Godzilla's reception upon release wasn't as unanimously positive as you'd imagine, with a lot of Japanese critics finding the film distasteful, but the film became a massive success, and over time, the merits of the film came to be better appreciated. In 1956, an American cut of the film was released, Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, with new scenes filmed with actor Raymond Burr. I've never watched this version of the film, but from what I've heard, it's a decent attempt to Americanise the original film, albeit one that sanitises some of the original film's darker elements and changes its ending to be a bit more optimistic. 

Like the original, this American version was a huge success, especially with western audiences. The original film would also be followed up in 1955 with Godzilla Raids Again, where Godzilla battled his first on-screen opponent; Anguirus, that film was later released in the west under the title, Gigantis, The Fire Monster. Like King of the Monsters!, I haven't watched Godzilla Raids Again or Gigantis, The Fire Monster, though the Criterion Collection includes King of the Monsters! and Godzilla Raids Again, so I really have no excuse. Over the Next twenty years, Godzilla would appear in thirteen more films, where he would fight Ghidorah, a three headed dragon from space, Mothra, a giant Moth and living Goddess, Ebirah, a giant lobster, Hedorah, a mutant tadpole from space, Gigan, a cyborg bird monster from space and Mechagodzilla, a robot doppelganger from, you guessed it, space, and plenty other weird and wonderful giant monsters, before the franchise finally ran out of steam in 1975 with Terror of Mechagodzilla. We'll talk about the films of what's called the Showa series later though. The franchise would, of course, return several more times after 1975, first in 1984 with The Return of Godzilla, then again in 1999 with Godzilla 2000, and with the release of the second American Godzilla film in 2014 and the start of the Monsterverse, Godzilla's relevance and popularity has never really gone away, only fallen and risen like the tide. And with an ongoing American Godzilla series and a pair of box office dominating Japanese films, the tide is high, and that makes me happy. 

A Sleeping Giant

What made Godzilla such a massive name in movie monsters was how his debut film struck a chord with so many people, how it told a story that needed to be told and was uncompromising in its message and imagery, so much so that even after nearly seventy years, the original film remained the scariest in the entire franchise. In a time where the threat of Nuclear Armageddon was ever present, it exposed the world to the darkest horrors of Japan’s war, just as the war had exposed Japan to its darkest horrors. It’s a masterpiece and more than deserving of the reverence and appreciation it receives, though it’s not exactly a fun watch, that would come later in Godzilla’s long and very diverse filmography. In Part two, we'll be looking over the next fifty years of Godzilla's history, through the Showa, Heisei and Millennium years of the franchise.