As an action movie, it’s plodding. As drive-in fun, it’s too depressing. As a giant lizard movie, it’s got too much romance and as a romance it’s got too much of the giant lizard. Time hasn’t been kind to the first Godzilla movie. What was once a controversial hit is now likely to make some audiences yawn. The monster is made of rubber and the characters are made of cardboard with scarcely a drop of charisma among its cast (with the exception of Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura as a beleaguered scientist). Tokyo catches fire, but little else here does.
That said, it’s still an essential artifact of 1950s atomic paranoia and a must for anyone who considers themselves a student of cinema’s lowdown corners. In a period where sci-fi films obsessed over the atom bomb, Godzilla offers the unique perspective of a country that knows the effects of the bomb firsthand. While American sci-fi movies of the 1950s fantasize about the future of atomic energy, Godzilla wrestles with the recent past.
Godzilla IS an atom bomb here. Its trail of destruction is depicted so much like Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the scenes could pass for 1945 stock footage. The film is actually more interested in its views of devastated Japan than it is in any rip-roarin’ man-vs-giant-lizard action. Director Ishiro Honda (who’d go on to direct 11,000 more rubber suit monster movies) takes time to crawl the smoking streets and show documentary-style scenes of destroyed homes, makeshift medical centers, bleeding bodies and children crying over dead mothers. He also quietly depicts a country that unites to support each other and help pick up the pieces. Maybe Honda doesn’t direct good action scenes, but he knows how to mourn the dead, which is the point of this film, anyway.