Kicking it off.

Recently i bought myself 'The Godzilla Collection.' Honesty, until now i've seen only three Godzilla films during my entire life - and that includes the Roland Emmerich remake from 1998. But regardless of not being up to speed on the series, since the age of four i've been enthralled by Toho Studios' creatures. And now, as a progressing film maker and a film buff i'm coming back to the films i loved as a kid. Not for any real reason other than to appreciate them.

Until this box set i'd not seen the original 'Gojira.' I'd always assumed Toho and The Japanese in general treated The Big G as some sort of private in-joke, exporting it purely for financial gain to cliquey types who got excited over subtitles and political commentary - or to American Studios to (i shit you not) re-cut the films entirely and replace the story and dialogue with totally new actors. But i was wrong - if anything, watching the original film shunted the entire series (numbering 30 if you count re-cuts and remakes) into a new perspective for me. It's anything but a joke - and no matter how many times that guy in a rubber suit boots a building over or falls over a train, the actors surrounding the chaos and destruction play it completely straight. Every time i felt a hearty chuckle coming on, one of those stone-faced actors would come on screen and remind me how serious shit was getting. And it does get serious...

Invariably i'm going to have to tackle the environment and climate around the first film - Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Daigo Fukuryu Maru. Japan got flattened by the American Military in WWII, and i mean flattened. Nuclear Armament, even though in its infancy had replaced Religion in both priorities and the food chain. The making of 'Gojira' coincides with the advent of Atom Monsters in The States, monsters that were born or created through the use of nuclear waste or atomic age sciences. There's far too many to list, but generally they're mistakenly called 'B-Movies' ... The correct name is 'Exploitation Movies.'

I JUST TAUGHT YOU SOMETHING, WHAAAAT?!?!

So here comes Godzilla. Even though his exposition is hard to understand and inconsistant - it's generally regarded that he exists because of a certain unnamed country's nuclear weapons testing. In fact, the early scenes with the fishing trawlers being set aflame by burning white lights are about as unsubtle as film can get. Then some stuff happened between uninteresting characters who somehow all know each other and somehow seem to be pretty calm... Perhaps they all got house insurance. But i think the most important scene is Toho Studios' money shot - Godzilla trashing Tokyo. If you visually compare what's going on here to what the western world were making, you see just how far ahead it was for the time. No stop-motion and very little in the way of composite effects shots. It's a beautifully scaled recreation of Tokyo then blows up, smashes, falls apart and crumbles about as close to the real thing as a model can do. If i'd seen this in 1954 i'd have utterly shat myself. Apparently this is cheap film making? It's a shame that the story and the characters get lost within the striking majesty of this one scene - the film never again quite reaches those heights. The camera slowly trails across the city wasteland to Ifukube's haunting music as a closure to the scene. Even if the story and characters are pretty much redundant by comparison to Big G's rampage, the commentary is not. And for this, credit is due.

Obviously, this being (hopefully, eventually) a film/game sound and music blog i need to say something about that aspect of Godzilla. The sound is pretty bad, even for the time. Effects and dubs are out of time, a lot of the time effects don't even suit what they're put to - and while i can understand WHY Gojira's rampages are sometimes hauntingly quiet, one of the characters slammed a door and it sounded like a mountain, coughing. Although considering Japan was practically annihilated a mere ten years prior to this film - i can let them off i think. The music, however, is off the chain. It's ten, if not fifteen years ahead of Western Cinema, both in it's use of orchestral instruments as sound effects and its tension-building perfection. Ifukube uses maces made from knotted rope as a beater and huge drums to make Godzilla's footsteps, which when heard off-screen - all the actors suddenly react accordingly. The iconic sound of the monster is made by dragging a gauntletted hand down the length of a de-tuned Double Bass string. Sorry, Ben Burrt (Star Wars) these guys were twenty five years ahead.


Musicially, everything drives forward and slows down gracefully, the cues and flow of the music are very typically American in their execution and presentation and at times doesn't move well with the Japanese way of storytelling. But it's successful - to listen to this music now, provided you have a remastered copy, it hasn't dated at all. Murray Gold and Chris Franke are doing music very similar and very minimalist on modern productions.