Godzilla's Roaring History

By the mid-1980s Godzilla was a known quantity worldwide. Beyond the original 15 movies from Japan, there’d been an American Saturday morning cartoon and a Marvel comic book. A two-minute Canadian animated short imagined Godzilla meeting Bambi. Blue Öyster Cult wrote a hit song about the King of the Monsters. But there’d been no new feature film since 1975.

Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, who’d overseen the development of Godzilla from a single movie into a long-running series, tried for years to get a new film off the ground. Dissatisfied with the kid-friendly approach he’d mandated for most of the movies, Tanaka wanted to go back to basics with a sequel to the original Godzilla that made no reference to any following film. The word ‘reboot’ was not yet applied to stories—it was invented as a computer term two years before—but that was what he had in mind.

It took a while to get off the ground, but 1984 saw the release of The Return of Godzilla. Godzilla was reimagined narratively and visually. The grumpy protector of most previous films was no more. He was a threat again, with a look recalling his original appearance instead of the relatively gentler design that’d developed over time.

If the new Godzilla looked back to his original appearance in 1954, he was also fit for the pop culture world of the 1980s. Genre fiction was growing darker and grittier. Fantastical ideas that worked in the drugged-out 1960s and post-hippie 1970s were abandoned for sleeker and more violent tales. Space opera was giving way to cyberpunk. Star Trek III made lots of money in 1984, but The Terminator would have more lasting cultural impact. Tanaka’s new Godzilla would fit in with this moment.

Godzilla’s creator, director Ishiro Honda, chose not to helm the movie, involved with a friend’s film project—and since the friend was Akira Kurosawa and the movie was Ran, it’s hard to blame him. Instead Koji Hashimoto, an assistant director on several previous Godzilla films, directed from a script by Hideichi Nagahara that built on years of previous drafts.

The film opens with a fishing ship caught in a massive storm and pulled toward a nearby island; we catch a glimpse of a familiar massive shape, evoking Godzilla’s first appearance in 1954. Later, a journalist named Goro Maki (Ken Tanaka; the character’s name and nothing else comes from the lead human in 1967’s Son of Godzilla) looks for the now-vanished ship, and finds it. Everyone aboard is dead except for a traumatized student named Hiroshi Okumura (Shin Takuma) and some giant sea louses.

Okumura’s isolated by the government, and when Maki tries to publish a story about Okumura seeing Godzilla the government won’t allow it to be printed. Maki recruits Okumura’s sister Naoko (Yasuko Sawaguchi) and bioscience professor Makoto Hayashida (Yosuke Natsuki); together they see Hiroshi, but meanwhile the Prime Minister of Japan is facing pressure from the USA and USSR, worried about the return of Godzilla—who by this time has also destroyed a Soviet nuclear sub, and has an appetite for nuclear radiation.

The superpowers want to use nuclear weapons against Japan, especially after Godzilla comes ashore and feeds off a nuclear power plant. The Prime Minster convinces the superpowers not to deploy their nukes, but as the Japanese prepare a plan to lure Godzilla into a volcano, the mighty lizard attacks Tokyo. They deploy a new flying fighter, the Super X, but the human characters must survive the devastation Godzilla wreaks, and the threat of a Soviet nuclear strike into the bargain.

It’s reasonably effective, though the characters lose depth as the story goes on, and the ending’s anticlimactic. The story spends a lot of time with politicians arguing about their response to Godzilla, and while that gives a sense of the scale of Godzilla’s threat, the politicians don’t come alive as characters with hopes and fears beyond the immediate issue of a giant irradiated dinosaur. But the re-establishment of Godzilla as a symbol of nuclear danger in the Cold War works, unsubtle but powerful. The sense of apocalypse is successful; Hayashida, whose parents were killed in Godzilla’s 1954 attack, tells us “Godzilla is truly a sign of the end times for humanity” and we believe him.

That’s mainly because the movie is tenser than any Godzilla since the original. The early scenes on the almost-deserted ship have the strongest feel of horror to them of any Godzilla film, with mummified corpses and grotesque giant louses; that one sequence has more gore and corpses than all the color Godzilla movies put together. The acting’s less over-the-top than previous films, too, though the characters still can’t be said to have much interiority.

The cinematography’s richer, a little like a comic-book in the way of certain 1980s science-fiction films; Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo reminds me of the Metropolis fight in Superman II, in the colors and lighting. The special effects are notably better, in that the Godzilla suit’s more complex and the models more detailed.

The movie’s not as good as the original. It’s more reminiscent of the second film, a straightforward monster movie, but is better than that one in its pacing and sense of style. There’s no shock of the new here, as there was in the original Godzilla, but the political dimension and the re-establishing of Godzilla as a symbol of the nuclear age make it stand out. The old-fashioned charm of the 1960s and 70s Godzilla films is gone, replaced with a very 1980s sense of action-movie spectacle.