Boats are disappearing off the coast of Japan, and the few survivors claim their ships were attacked by a monster. Not long after, the village on Odo Island is hit by a brutal storm in the night, but it appears something else was present within the storm. So a research team is sent to the island led by the paleontologist Dr. Yamata, with his daughter Emiko and her boyfriend Ogata tagging along. There they find some of the island irradiated, and soon, discover the culprit: a giant prehistoric monster called Godzilla, awakened by the United States' atomic tests in the pacific. Now the beast is stalking the Japanese coastline, and when it makes landfall, the Japanese military is powerless to stop him. Emiko knows of a way to potentially defeat Godzilla, but she made a promise to her ex, Dr. Serizawa to keep his secret invention a secret, the oxygen destroyer. Emiko and Ogata confront Serizawa, as the weapon may be the only way to put Godzilla's reign of terror to an end, but Serizawa knows of the horrors that may be brought about if his terrifying weapon is revealed to the world.
Cast
- Takashi Shimura
- Akihiko Hirata
- Akira Takarada
- Momoko Kochi
- Toyoaki Suzuki
- Haruo Nakajima
Crew
- Director: Ishiro Honda
- Producer: Tomoyuki Tanaka
- Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya
- Writer: Takeo Murata
- Writer: Shigeru Kayama
- Editor: Kazuji Taira
- Cinematography: Masao Tamai
- Composer: Akira Ifukube
Review
The original Godzilla, also known as Gojira, because that's his name in Japan and there are two other movies simply called "Godzilla", is my favorite film of all time. Now when I first saw it as a kid, I didn't care for it at all. Granted, I was watching the American re-edit, but back then I also only watched Godzilla movies to see big monsters beat the crap out of each other. As I got older though, I eventually got around to checking out the film again and in its original Japanese version and quickly grew to appreciate it. This is not a simple monster on the loose B-movie, it tackles deep themes and has imagrey that was controversial at the time in Japan, since less than ten years prior Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed and the same year of the films release, a Japanese fishing boat was irradiated by a nuclear test in the south pacific, which was directly referenced in the opening scene of the film. Godzilla is a representation of the atomic bomb, an unstoppable force of pure destruction, so how do you stop it? This is where one of the main characters, who really shows up about half way through, enters the picture. Dr. Serizawa, a scientist who was studying oxygen, and accidently created a weapon of horrible destruction: the oxygen destroyer. It's the only thing that has the chance of killing Godzilla, but Serizawa doesn't want his deadly weapon to be revealed out of fear of how the world will inevitably react. It's a powerful film, with some bone chilling scenes, that everyone should watch. I give the film ten fish skeletons out of ten!