Deep Impact

BIG LIZARD IN MY BACK YARD: The big G takes Tokyo.

The original Godzilla hits America, 50 years late.

Godzilla

by Sam Adams

It's in the nature of movie monsters to return from the grave, so it's fitting that the original Godzilla is back in theaters 50 years after its initial release. But be warned: The radioactive, fire-breathing creature from beneath the sea hasn't brought Raymond Burr along this time. In fact, this uncut, undubbed version is practically a U.S. premiere.

Retitled Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Ishirô Honda's brooding, elegiac film was recut into a drive-in cheapie for its initial American release. Forty minutes were hacked out, and 20 minutes added with Burr as an American reporter covering the carnage. Worse, Honda's original was treated as so much stock footage. Godzilla's rampage through Tokyo, with its eerie resonance to the Allied firebombing, was carefully left by Honda until an hour into the movie; in the American version, it's the first thing you see. An explicit (if not coherent) anti-nuke allegory, the Japanese version ends with the solemn Dr. Yamane (Kurosawa veteran Takashi Shimura) musing that if mankind continues testing nuclear weapons, another Godzilla will surely be awakened from its watery sleep. The American version, quite by contrast, is tidily wrapped up by Burr's voiceover: "The whole world could wake up and live again."

There's no such optimism in the original. Indeed, for a disaster movie, Godzilla is unusually solemn, filled with silences that aren't ominous so much as funereal. (The comparison was especially acute since a simultaneous screening of The Day After Tomorrow kept booming through the dividing wall.) Though in later movies, Godzilla (whose original name, Gojira, is about the only thing that hasn't been restored) acquired a new personality to suit each variation on the story, here it's a force of nature, unleashed by human foolishness. There's no malice in its movements, even as it's melting electrical towers and cramming train cars into its mouth. Predating the dawn of humankind, the Jurassic beast predates morality as well. Like the H-bomb, a repeated point of comparison, Godzilla destroys because it has no other purpose.

A second, and potentially more deadly, weapon finds its way into the story, in the form of the Oxygen Destroyer, a potential doomsday device that looks a little too much like an orange juicer. The next step in the man-against-lizard arms race, the Oxygen Destroyer is permitted a single use by its inventor, Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), whose eyepatch can't cover his wartime scars. But rather than risk the device's exploitation, Serizawa sacrifices himself, and the Oxygen Destroyer and Godzilla are destroyed in the same instant. In essence, the only country to suffer the devastation of nuclear weapons sent a message to the world conveying the danger of their continued existence, and the horror they could wreak on a nation and its people. In that light, the American version, which reduces a cautionary tale to a cheesy monster movie, seems less like a bastardization, and more like a product of willful blindness.

Godzilla Directed by Ishirô Honda A Rialto Pictures release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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