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Godzilla: why the Japanese original is no joke
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thinbl...@gmail.com
Feb 11, 2018, 7:39:23 AM2/11/18
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Godzilla: why the Japanese original is no joke
By Tim Martin 15 May 2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10788996/Godzilla-why-the-Japanese-original-is-no-joke.html
Western audiences have spent more than half a century thinking of Godzilla as a joke dinosaur in a rubber suit, a Japanese trash-culture ‘King of the Monsters’ locked in endless battle with giant moths, dragons, armadillos and skyscraper-sized robots. Against this camp backdrop, then, it may seem surprising to hear Gareth Edwards, the director of this summer’s Godzilla film, declare his intention to portray the monster as “a force of nature, like the wrath of God or vengeance for the way we’ve behaved”.
But the idea of presenting Godzilla as the harbinger of man-made apocalypse isn't simply another gritty reboot for an age in which children’s franchises have become big-budget adult entertainment. It harks back 60 years to an almost forgotten chapter in the franchise’s history: the tragic story of nuclear paranoia told by the original Gojira in 1954.
Released in the same year as Seven Samurai, directed by a colleague of Kurosawa’s and starring one of Japan’s most famous actors, the film Gojira was a far cry from its B-movie successors. It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience.
Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy.
3
To its first viewers in 1954, Gojira also evoked a disturbingly recent catastrophe. In March that year, the crew of a boat called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) had been fishing off the Marshall Islands, the string of atolls in the Northern Pacific that had been captured from Japan by the US during the Second World War.
Just before dawn, they saw a blinding flash in the sky and heard what sounded like a thunderclap. Before long a white ash began to settle on the decks of their vessel, which the bewildered sailors shovelled into heaps and dumped over the side. By evening, several of them were vomiting and covered in strange burns. When the Lucky Dragon limped back to its home port of Yaizu a fortnight later, it was clear that the men were suffering from radiation sickness.
It was less than two years since Japan’s American occupiers had made their exit from the country, and memories of the A-bomb attacks that had ended the war were still painfully fresh. When the US acknowledged that the crew of the Lucky Dragon had been caught in the fallout from its secret hydrogen bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, the Japanese reaction was immediate and furious. Other fishing boats were soon found to have been similarly exposed, and the bottom dropped out of the lucrative tuna market. When the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator died that autumn, 400,000 people went to his funeral.
In this tense atmosphere, the opening scenes of Gojira could scarcely have been more provocative. Thudding drumbeats and unearthly howls accompany the stark opening titles, before the scene changes to the deck of a fishing boat in the Pacific, where the crew are relaxing, chatting and playing guitar. The ocean begins to boil. The men are blinded and burnt as they flee in terror. Tapping out his desperate SOS below decks, the ship’s radio operator is the first to die. Once again, Gojira suggested, the Japanese people was being attacked in its homeland by history’s greatest superweapon.
But why cast such an incendiary political statement as a monster movie?
------------------
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65rW_SIzg0
The Smoke Monster Origins....from LOST:
https://vimeo.com/122245371
By Tim Martin 15 May 2014
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10788996/Godzilla-why-the-Japanese-original-is-no-joke.html
Western audiences have spent more than half a century thinking of Godzilla as a joke dinosaur in a rubber suit, a Japanese trash-culture ‘King of the Monsters’ locked in endless battle with giant moths, dragons, armadillos and skyscraper-sized robots. Against this camp backdrop, then, it may seem surprising to hear Gareth Edwards, the director of this summer’s Godzilla film, declare his intention to portray the monster as “a force of nature, like the wrath of God or vengeance for the way we’ve behaved”.
But the idea of presenting Godzilla as the harbinger of man-made apocalypse isn't simply another gritty reboot for an age in which children’s franchises have become big-budget adult entertainment. It harks back 60 years to an almost forgotten chapter in the franchise’s history: the tragic story of nuclear paranoia told by the original Gojira in 1954.
Released in the same year as Seven Samurai, directed by a colleague of Kurosawa’s and starring one of Japan’s most famous actors, the film Gojira was a far cry from its B-movie successors. It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience.
Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy.
3
To its first viewers in 1954, Gojira also evoked a disturbingly recent catastrophe. In March that year, the crew of a boat called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) had been fishing off the Marshall Islands, the string of atolls in the Northern Pacific that had been captured from Japan by the US during the Second World War.
Just before dawn, they saw a blinding flash in the sky and heard what sounded like a thunderclap. Before long a white ash began to settle on the decks of their vessel, which the bewildered sailors shovelled into heaps and dumped over the side. By evening, several of them were vomiting and covered in strange burns. When the Lucky Dragon limped back to its home port of Yaizu a fortnight later, it was clear that the men were suffering from radiation sickness.
It was less than two years since Japan’s American occupiers had made their exit from the country, and memories of the A-bomb attacks that had ended the war were still painfully fresh. When the US acknowledged that the crew of the Lucky Dragon had been caught in the fallout from its secret hydrogen bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, the Japanese reaction was immediate and furious. Other fishing boats were soon found to have been similarly exposed, and the bottom dropped out of the lucrative tuna market. When the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator died that autumn, 400,000 people went to his funeral.
In this tense atmosphere, the opening scenes of Gojira could scarcely have been more provocative. Thudding drumbeats and unearthly howls accompany the stark opening titles, before the scene changes to the deck of a fishing boat in the Pacific, where the crew are relaxing, chatting and playing guitar. The ocean begins to boil. The men are blinded and burnt as they flee in terror. Tapping out his desperate SOS below decks, the ship’s radio operator is the first to die. Once again, Gojira suggested, the Japanese people was being attacked in its homeland by history’s greatest superweapon.
But why cast such an incendiary political statement as a monster movie?
------------------
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T65rW_SIzg0
The Smoke Monster Origins....from LOST:
https://vimeo.com/122245371
thinbl...@gmail.com
Feb 11, 2018, 4:15:21 PM2/11/18
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By Rebecca Winters Keegan Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1704356,00.html
http://content.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1704356,00.html
J.J. Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost and director of Mission: Impossible III, produced Cloverfield, a monster movie for the YouTube era, opening Jan. 18. TIME's Hollywood correspondent, Rebecca Winters Keegan, sat down with him on the set of the new Star Trek movie he's directing, where Abrams talked about sci-fi as catharsis, the age of self-documentation and why we're so obsessed with the end of the world.
TIME: What's behind the enduring popularity of apocalyptic tales?
ABRAMS: Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time. The theory of attack became the reality of attack seven years ago. It's no coincidence that so many stories are being told that grapple in different ways with "us vs. them."
What's your version?
Cloverfield is fantasy. The movie is meant to be entertainment — to give people the sort of thrill I had as a kid watching monster movies. I hadn't seen anything that felt that way for many years. I felt like there had to be a way to do a monster movie that's updated and fresh. So we came up with the YouTube-ification of things, the ubiquity of video cameras, cell phones with cameras. The age of self-documentation felt like a wonderful prism through which to look at the monster movie. Our take is what if the absolutely preposterous would happen? How terrifying would that be? The video camera, we all have access to; there's a certain odd and eerie intimacy that goes along with those videos. Our take is a classic B monster movie done in a way that makes it feel very real and relevant, allowing it to be simultaneously spectacular and incredibly intimate.
Movies that take on themes of terrorism and war head on don't do very well at the box office. Is sci-fi the best outlet for our societal fears about those things?
My favorite series was the Twilight Zone. Before that, Rod Serling was dealing with issues of politics and race and getting into a great deal of trouble with the censors and the advertisers. The feeling was that people watch TV to forget those things. When he did the Twilight Zone he made a conscious effort to do a show that could deal with those things and not get him into trouble. He was a brilliant social commentator. Everything you were looking at was incredibly resonant, even though you were talking about a guy with three eyes or a woman who was 90 feet tall.
With Cloverfield we were trying to create a film that would be entertaining and, as a by-product of the subject matter, perhaps be a catharsis. We wanted to let people live through their wildest fears but be in a safe place where the enemy is the size of a skyscraper instead of some stateless, unseen cowardly terrorist.
Did you fear cutting too close to the bone by setting it in New York City?
Certainly we could have set the film in Chicago or San Francisco, but there's something about Manhattan that is for me the most powerful and iconic city in the world. When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing a movie about the destruction of a city because of a radioactive man-made thing — it must have had a similar feeling. It was very much a way to deal, in a social, communal way, with everyone's common fears. On the one hand it's a silly man in a rubber suit; on the other hand it's a way to process these fears that are mostly bottled up. Anyone who is upset about Cloverfield must have had the same reaction to the recent Spider-Man films or I Am Legend or the King Kong remake.
But Cloverfield's storytelling style looks to be much more intimate than a big-budget CGI movie, and, therefore, maybe scarier.
There are hundreds of incidents and images out of Iraq on hand-held video that are horrifying. All of those images we considered in making the movie 'cause they show the way things actually look. A lot of the reality of this film is sold on your feeling like this was not documented by a director or a photographer, but rather by an everyman. In many of these Iraq videos, we felt like we were just missing the most terrifying thing.
Does the popularity of end-of the-world narratives suggest we're secretly longing for it to happen?
Not for me. For me, it's the idea of the bigger they come the harder they fall, the idea of seeing the Titanic, the unbreakable, unsinkable ship go down. Whenever a toddler sees a pile of blocks, he wants to tear it down. Cloverfield takes the incredibly familiar and relatable, and it adds an element of absolutely fantastical. It's like in Planet of the Apes: When you see the Statue of Liberty on the beach, you realize, this creepy and compelling story happened where I live.
moviePig
Feb 11, 2018, 4:51:15 PM2/11/18
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