There have been hundreds of monster movies over the years, but only a handful of enduringly great movie monsters. Of those, only two were created for the screen: King Kong, the giant ape atop the Empire State Building, and his Japanese heir, Godzilla, the city-flattening sea monster who’s a genuinely terrific pop icon. He not only stars in movies — Hollywood is bringing out a new Godzilla on May 16 — but he’s even played basketball with Charles Barkley in a commercial for Nike.
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Every bit of news surrounding the upcoming May 16, 2014, blockbuster release Godzilla has been building so much hype for those excited to see the rebooted monster movie. In a recent Q&A session after the film was screened, director Gareth Edwards and producer Thomas Tull talked all about the movie and what we can expect.
“We were trying to put more into it than just a simple monster movie,” Edwards said. “Because the original was definitely a metaphor for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a very serious film, so we were inspired to try and reflect that.”
Edwards went on to explain that, like the original Japanese movie that pointed a damning finger at the United States for nuclear weapons, his 2014 adaptation targets those with nuclear arms since his monsters are fed by radiation.
“The West … we police the world and go, ‘You can’t have nuclear power. You can’t have it. But we can have it, and we have nuclear weapons,’” the director explained. “And what if there were a creature that existed, creatures that were attracted to radiation? Suddenly the tables would be turned, and we’d be desperately trying to get rid of that stuff.”
What do you think of Edwards comments on his upcoming movie? Let us know in the comments section below!
Meanwhile the topic of a possible sequel or sequels popped up, but producer Tull was hesitant to make any promises.
“We’re passionate fans of the universe,” he explained. “My biggest dream from this, frankly, is that [kids] go to this movie with their parents, and a long time from now, they’re talking about how this is what made them a Godzilla fan.”
Godzilla is out in just a couple of weeks, but five scenes have just been released showcasing different aspects of the movie – from Godzilla and Muto about to throw down on the streets of San Francisco to Bryan Cranston bringing some equally heavyweight acting. We even find out more about Godzilla’s adversary, who we still know little about.
It’s been six decades since Godzilla first hit the screen, and to celebrate the big guy’s birthday, Rialto Pictures is releasing Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original — in a restored, 60th-anniversary edition — in theaters. I’ve seen Godzilla many times since I was a kid, but watching it again, I was struck that it might be the best single film about the terrors of the nuclear age.
I suspect you know the plot. It begins when American H-bomb tests in the Pacific disturb the watery environment that’s the home of Gojira, as the monster is called in Japanese. After sinking assorted ships, this enormous beast winds up in Tokyo, where he stomps on buildings, flosses with power lines and blasts citizens with his radioactive bad breath. When the army is unable to stop him, the only hope is a new invention called the Oxygen Destroyer. But its idealistic creator is reluctant to reveal it for fear it will become a weapon — just look at the destruction that followed from splitting the atom.
Yet even as the inventor says this, the movie itself is offering us the seductive spectacle of violent ruin. And make no mistake: Destruction is great to look at. There’s an amoral pleasure to be had in watching Godzilla reduce Tokyo to fiery rubble, rather like the beauty of seeing those napalmed palm trees flare like matches in Apocalypse Now or the illicit thrill of seeing the White House get obliterated in Independence Day — before Sept. 11, of course. Quite clearly, it’s this joy in destruction that helped make Godzilla influential, especially in Hollywood, which over the past half-century has fed the worldwide audience’s appetite for images of spectacular violence.
That said, Godzilla’s real strength lies not in its effects — impressive for the time — but in its underlying emotional and cultural seriousness. It’s not simply that the music is often doleful rather than exciting or that we see doomed children set off Geiger counters. The movie has a gravity that comes from being created in a Japan that knew what it was to have children die from radiation poisoning and to see its capital city in flames. Both drawn to and terrified of the monster’s power, the movie is steeped in Japan’s traumatic historical experience. It has weight.
