Godzilla, King of the Monsters! Review

Review of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) by screenqueeen: 👍 3/5

an affront to the motivation behind Honda's painstaking allegorical effort but a deal taken all the same. when no one knew what the future held for Gojira in Japan or Godzilla in american terms, this made great business sense and every insert scene with back-of-the-head lookalikes is deftly woven in but in co-creating this cleverly quiet technical marvel it's impossible to ignore how it piggybacks on someone else's monumental achievement and cheapens it to an insulting degree. american film producers have always seen films overseas as something to re-interpret at their most creative and something to re-market at their most avaricious.

i've put off watching this and didn't want to initiate it on my own but being presented with the opportunity to see it hosted on 16mm film, i had to take the chance. in a very fitting way the film stock itself decayed to the point of vinegar syndrome so the chance of it being destroyed while it was projecting was certainly there.

it's fitting because in superimposing an american disposition over the destruction of a newly built, modern Japanese way of life, the despair over what is lost is overshadowed by the american perspective and robs it of what it really is: a tragedy for the Japanese people. rebuilding can take the form of thought & creativity and the process of analyzation of that which came before. so when american interlopers take on the role of re-interpreting that sensitive period it can invalidate those achievements of comradery in creating something new, something more peaceful from what was obliterated by the tides of war. superimposing an american voice over this is disgusting to so many degrees, especially 11 years since the bombing of two Japanese cities.

within this american version of GODZILLA, everything is focused on the monster itself once he emerges, the real stakes and relationships inconsequentially dissolving in relativity to the grand scale of destruction. this is something we have never gotten over as a country and probably never will. we measure power in the capability of destruction and the option not to use it if certain conditions are met. peace and collaboration always comes with the suggestion of a threat; peace and collaboration without trust is never really peace and collaboration. and i don't see trust in the way Ishiro Honda's seminal film was handled, not even in the disingenuous way Burr's character feigns respect to his Japanese consorts. he is an insert and does not deserve the respect american influence says he must receive retroactively from every character who never needed him in the first place. he should have died when that building toppled.