Steve Reviews: Godzilla 1954 (The Original)

[Music] you Damon [Music] you [Music] okay I know that the original Godzilla film isn't animated and so doesn't quite fit on this channel as we do animated reviews but it is very dark takes itself very seriously and is actually quite disturbing in places and so in that sense it does kind of fit on this channel plus I'm also a massive Godzilla fan from the good films to the not-so-good films even specially ordered a DVD set from America when I was young as Godzilla wasn't widely available to watch on DVD in the UK and streaming movies online wasn't really a thing yet [Music] the only problem with this though was that the DVDs were locked to region 1 which is the region for America for the UK and ironically Japan we are region 2 so after getting the DVDs I couldn't play them on my ps2 as it was locked on region 2 so I had to then spend extra money on a cheap DVD player where you could input a code using the remote control to manually change the DVD player settings in the region menu ah life before Pirate Bay the original Godzilla film has been something that I've wanted to review as as a lot to say about it and seen as how the latest Godzilla film is now being shown in cinemas seems like a fitting time to talk about it so I do hope you enjoy the Godzilla series is officially the longest continuously running film franchise of all time where even today as this review has been made we're still seeing theatrical releases at the time of this review there is a grand total of 35 Godzilla films that have been used during the course of those 35 Godzilla films there have been some massive tonal changes along the series from Godzilla being a bad guy to Godzilla being a good guy to Godzilla being this but in his first film he was kind of Niva and instead was used as a symbol to portray something else something far more real and far more deadly to our world so let's take a look at where it all started the original Godzilla film Godzilla no not that one or that one no Jesus Christ the 1954 film and it's also important that I state the 1954 film as there was also a western adaptation made called Godzilla king of the monsters no not that one Christ why do filmmakers have to give iconic movies the same title over and over again it means that we have to put the bloody year of release at the end of each title I'm talking about the 1956 film Godzilla king of the monsters which many people assume is just an English dub of the 1954 film but there's actually a lot of differences edited in which in my opinion makes it a far lesser product but we'll get into that later for now though let's take a look at Godzilla 1954 at least we will be taking a look at Godzilla 1954 as soon as I get my bloody DVD to work as it looks like to this day I'm still having trouble viewing Godzilla films as the DVD I bought from HMV isn't plain on VLC media player I try to be good I try to be honest but this is just why it's so much bloody easier to torrent the damn fit okay so while I try and fix this let's channel back nine years before the film's release to 1945 the Second World War was drawing to a close Germany had surrendered on the 8th of May but Japan insisted on fighting on the Allies called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese forces warning that the alternative would be and I quote prompt and utter destruction Japan however ignored that ultimatum and decided to keep fighting on a decision which would lead to the loss of over two hundred and twenty six thousand lives on the 6th of August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima the blast of the bond decimated everything within range reducing buildings to dust and people to ashes a second bomb was then dropped on Nagasaki three days later with the same devastating effects those that managed to survive the initial blast will continue to die for many months after from burns malnutrition and most crucially radiation sickness jumping back to 1954 Toho produces what seems to be a typical monster movie simply titled as Gojira later to be popularized as Godzilla fun fact the term Gojira is actually a mixture of two Japanese words meaning gorilla and whale which I guess is supposed to illustrate how Godzilla is a giant of the sea and a powerful beast of the land though Godzilla himself went through many design alterations at one point even being a simple giant octopus Toho pushed the design to a more prehistoric dinosaur look with the body and head of a t-rex the dorsal plates of a Stegosaurus and the arms of an Iguanodon he would stand at 50 meters in height would be impervious to any modern-day weapons and would have the ability to shoot atomic breath from his mouth basically Godzilla was a force of unstoppable destruction fun fact the film would also be the first of its kind to adopt a technique called soup nation which would have a guy walking around in a rubber monster Sioux tramping through destructible model cities originally the director of the film wanted it to be shot using stop-motion just like the original lost world and King Kong films but stop-motion was proving to be a long and expensive process estimating that it would take seven years to complete so the alternative of using a guy in a suit was used instead as it was a much cheaper and quicker process and this technique of using suit Mason would continue to be used in the Godzilla films right up to 2004 now you'd think it would be a lot of fun to be the guy who got to wear the suit and get paid to knock down model cities but fun fact it wasn't the suit itself weighed a whopping 90 kilograms and the guy inside the suit Nakajima said that the temperatures inside of the suit could reach up to 60 degrees Celsius which actually led to him passing out several times during filming and it looks like I have now gotten the DVD player to work by using a god-awful DVD player app that spawns you full of obnoxious advertisements but hey at least it's plain I guess the film opens up with no music as we hear the sound of thundering footsteps followed by an unholy screech that will become the basis for Godzilla's iconic raw fun fact the roar was actually created by the film's composer a cure I [ __ ] coupe I [ __ ] who is that how you say I for Kubb I might have to relate this where he would use a leather glove coated in pine tar and rub it against the strings of a double bass speaking of a cure I [ __ ] coupe it was also him that created the original Godzilla theme which plays over the opening credits an iconic theme that would be featured in nearly all future Godzilla films in the opening scene we see a small Japanese Bo get destroyed by a strange white blast which appears from the ocean fun fact the scene is making reference to an actual event which happened to a Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5 where the crew were fishing in waters they thought would be in a safe zone from nearby nuclear bomb testings turns out the blast was much bigger than anyone expected and so the safe zone wasn't quite so safe after all as a result the twenty three crew members got contaminated by nuclear fallout and suffered acute radiation syndrome ok I guess that wasn't so much of a fun fact after all but a fact nonetheless and important to the context of this film as more ships are destroyed and fish in the oceans start depleting one of the odors on the local Island blames the events on a legendary sea monster called Godzilla right yeah roll credits later that night the island is hit by a storm but the local state that the level of damage caused could not have been done by a mere storm alone so the government sends out paleontologists dr. Yahama to lead an investigation they find that the island has high levels of radioactivity along with a trilobite that was thought to have gone extinct millions of years ago yep don't touch the child abite because of the radiation danger but please proceed to run your hands through the radioactive water suddenly the island alarm bell gets sounded and we get our first ever sighting of the king of the monsters fun fact did you know that when Godzilla originally appeared over the hill he was meant to have a little Cowley's mouth unfortunately the original footage of this doesn't exist and all we have left are a few select photos his appearance has built up similar to the Rex appearance in Jurassic Park where before he appears all we hear is his large footsteps approaching closer and closer though I am gonna run it as cool and iconic as this scene is you can't deny the fact that when the puppet used his suddenly turned to face towards the camera it does look really goofy and kind of derpy dirt almost as if Barney the dinosaur went on a bit of a meth binge dr. Junger now presents his findings back in Tokyo concluding that Godzilla was a prehistoric beast who had been disturbed by the underwater hydrogen bomb testings and as a result has also become contaminated in radiation everyone is in agreement that Godzilla must be destroyed except for dr. Jana Na who thinks it would be best to have the monster alive so it can be studied the government dropped depth charges into the ocean in an attempt to kill Godzilla which considering Godzilla has already been proven to survive a nuclear blast from a hydrogen bomb I really don't know what they were expecting depth charges to do then again the military being useless to stop Godzilla will become a comically recurring scene in all future Godzilla films we then get introduced to dr. Sarah Zara a scientist who accidentally created a device in his lab called the oxygen destroyer which will kill all life within its range [Music] yeah scientist who has a secret laboratory down in his basement while sporting an eyepatch accidentally creates a device which could end all life as we know it I've seen enough Bond villains to know that this guy is secretly evil well it actually turns out that he isn't secretly evil as he doesn't want this weapon to fall into the wrong hands and so not only refuses to use it on Godzilla but also demands that no one else's to know about it unless though he's so super secretly evil that he would rather Godzilla destroy everyone as he believes a slow painful death from the radiation sickness is far more satisfying than a quick death from the oxygen destroyer I can imagine Godzilla then emerges on Tokyo Bay where he briefly destroys everything in the area [Music] wait how did that changeover not see this giant 15 meter monster right in front of him then again badly driven trains are also a comical occurrence that we'll see in other Godzilla films in preparation for Godzilla's next attack the government sets up an electrified fence along the coastline armed with heavy artillery on the back lines unfortunately as you'd expect it does nothing to stop Godzilla and he ends up running rampage through the city of Tokyo now this is where the film starts to get particularly dark normally in a Godzilla film when Godzilla is rampaging through the city the focus is more on the spectacle of Godzilla plowing through all the model buildings in this film however much more focus is put on the people suffering from the damage that Godzilla is causing we get a mother who is reassuring her kids that they'll soon be able to join their father in heaven we get various shots of the many deaths and injuries occurring to people including a young girl who is grieving over the loss of her mother [Applause] [Music] that's pretty horrific it makes me wonder if when they were shooting this scene did they actually tell that child actor that her mother was really dead because that sounds like legitimate crying right there you'll also notice that the angles to film much of this destruction are fom low down this is cleverly done to make Godzilla look much bigger against the model City and the shots you get of the dark Godzilla walking against the harsh white of the burning city makes for a brilliant shot then again these were the people that first-hand witnessed the destruction of their own country less than ten years ago so it's no surprise that they managed to achieve such apocalyptic looking shots like this after seeing the horrific destruction that Godzilla has caused dr. Sarah Zara reluctantly agrees to use the oxygen destroyer but before he does make sure to destroy all of his research so that no one else can recreate the device a Navy ship manages to locate Godzilla resting on the ocean floor and so Sarah Zara heads down to deploy the device but once the device is deployed Sarah Zara refuses to head back to the surface and instead cuts off his air support where he dies along with Godzilla taken the last remaining secret of his oxygen destroyer to his grave and even though Godzilla is defeated there was no unanimous celebration above deck and dr. Jana nay even warns us that if nuclear testings like this continue another Godzilla could rise up even the film to close on a very bitter and song [Music] and so that was the original Godzilla film and unlike the other Godzilla films that would come out after this one wasn't simply about a guy in a rubber suit destroying some model buildings it wasn't designed with the intent of being a typical b-movie for entertainment but rather it was designed as a political message to warn against the use of nuclear weapons in this film Godzilla is not just a monster but more of a metaphor for nuclear destruction director AI Shiro Honda said the filming of Godzilla's rampage was to mirror the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stating if Godzilla had been a dinosaur of some other animal he would have been killed by just one cannonball but if he were equal to an atomic bomb we wouldn't know what to do so I took the characteristics of an atomic bomb and applied them to Godzilla and you can see that in the same way that the atomic blast was an unstoppable force that left cities in ruins so too was Godzilla and no amount of military firepower or defenses could stop him it's also worth noting just how much emphasis is put on the radiation effects of Godzilla as we even see survivors of the destruction testing positive for radiation poisoning I also like how the film emphasizes this with the use of children and how it's the innocence that get caught up in the suffering it's just too bad that this radioactive poisoning element of Godzilla is almost completely ignored in future Godzilla films then again Godzilla was slowly turning into a hero as the series progressed [Music] Deadly on smog only one force dares stand up was overpowering evil will Godzilla man's friend be vanquished and having a hero that gives you a terminal illness doesn't make for great writing oh thank you so much for saving me there Superman no problem Lois Lane by the way I should probably mention there from coming into contact with me you now have AIDS I even believe that the stomping footsteps we hear every time Godzilla appears unnaturally meant to be his footsteps but more to represent the sound of exploding bombs closing in as we hear them even when Godzilla clearly isn't working you could say that this is an editing mistake as the film does have some questionable editing throughout but after reading some of the directors commentary I actually think this was done intentionally but what's interesting about this film is that Godzilla is not the real problem in this it's people think about it quite early on they actually have a weapon to defeat Godzilla they could destroy him quite easily the real predicament comes from the issue that the weapon may be used to cause further destruction in the future hence why Sarah Zara has to come to the ultimate decision to take his own life now let's quickly talk about the 1956 adaption gods are looking at the monsters the original film was a big hit in Japan and caught the interest of American producers who wanted to produce a more westernized version to show American audiences the most notable differences in the two films is the addition of the characters Steve Martin who plays the role of a u.s. reporter visiting Japan during the attacks he's mostly just there to provide narration on stuff that's very clearly happening on-screen but he's also integrated into existing scenes of the original film to make a look like he was part of the original production to be honest this has actually done pretty well but if you've seen the original it comes glaringly obvious where he's been slipped in remember that powerful scene I mentioned earlier where we see the little distraught girl crying over a nun yeah that's gone and instead we just see Steve Martin injured on a stretcher other changes include a lot of deleting and redouble / scenes that talked about the threat of nuclear weapons ce-web-rity killer she's getting gonorrhea twister go Donald taurine Macha the Menace was gone so was a great man but the whole world could wake up and live again [Music] there were also other subtle changes like when musical scores would be added in two moments that were actually completely silenced an example of this is the scene where the mother is telling our kids that they will soon be with their father [Music] I just think the silence made this more impactful why feel the need to stick music over the top I don't want to hate on this adaptation too much and it is still an entertaining film and it's probably easier for mainstream audiences to watch but the lighter tone and removal of nuclear themes really does dumb down the impactful message of the original in conclusion the original Godzilla film isn't your typical old-school monster movie it isn't even your typical Godzilla movie it's a very dark and serious movie with a political message there happened to feature a monster in it it's by no means a perfect film being the 1950s the effects will be dated and the acting can be a bit wooden in places the editing questionable and the Godzilla suit can sometimes look a bit goofy looking dirt but it is still a film but I would highly recommend you guys check out [Music]

Channel: Steve Reviews

Views: 779,951

Rating: 4.946692 out of 5

Keywords: steve reviews, godzilla, gojira, godzilla 1954, first godzilla movie, movie, review, godzilla king of the monsters, japan, original godzilla

Id: QwMgj8I3b2Y

Length: 24min 26sec (1466 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019