Just the Ticket #200: Godzilla (1954)
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. Master Of the Tickets.
After all of my planning, procrastination, crunch, burnout, and delays (you can remind yourselves of the details by reading the State Of the Ticketverse 2025 and the most recent edition of Time Drops), I'm glad it worked out that I'm starting off Goj-Year-ra by reviewing the 1954 classic as my two hundredth Just the Ticket post.
Somewhere off the coast of Odo (the maintenance island attacked by Godzilla at the beginning of Minus One, but here, it's home to a fishing village because Gojira is set in its year of release, rather than during the end of the war), several ships are sunk amidst glowing eruptions of light and water, and the village is left in ruins by what is first believed to be a freak storm.
While Odo survivors clamor for relief assistance from the Diet in Tokyo because of the storm damage, personal losses, and an unusual fish shortage in the area, a local legend draws the attention of paleontologist Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura, Seven Samurai), who comes to believe the damage was caused not by a storm, but by said legend: a prehistoric amphibious missing link that the locals call Gojira (Godzilla, if you're watching with subtitles or are a fan from the West like me), irradiated and woken by hydrogen bomb tests that increased its size and gave it nuclear breath strong enough to melt steel and reduce major cities to fields of eternal flame in a matter of minutes. Despite popular opinion (and government, because the commercial impact of a radiation-breathing, nigh-immortal saurian is what really matters when people are dying and homeless and begging for answers, right?), Yamane wants to study Gojira to learn its secret for surviving massive levels of radiation exposure, rather than finding a way to kill it.
Enter Yamane's colleague and potential son-in-law, Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata, the Samurai Trilogy—though he's also played a variety of characters throughout the kaiju genre and the Godzilla franchise, specifically): a man who defies character-design convention by being a scientist with an eyepatch who isn't a supervillain (despite having invented a weapon capable of fissioning and destroying the oxygen out of everything it touches and converting the remains into a liquid state).
Besides the human characters being incredibly stupid and unskilled (thinking they can take out a two hundred million-year-old radioactive dinosaur with electricity and barbed wire, congregating at the top of a flimsy tower covered in flashing lights during a monster attack, and missing said radioactive dinosaur monster with dozens of missiles from a relatively close range, just to name a few examples) and the early human interest stuff being a bureaucratic slog, the main human plot centers around perhaps one of the worst female characters in fiction.
Hot take: I hate Emiko Yamane. Yes, Momoko Kōchi (Godzilla vs. Destoroyah) was a classic beauty and acts the hell out of her, but Emiko (daughter of Dr. Yamane and fiance of Dr. Serizawa) is an unlikable, unfaithful character who starts the movie by cheating on a brilliant scientist with a salvage ship captain (the admittedly handsome Akira Takarada, who would soon star with Kōchi in the abominable snowman picture, Half Human) and spends the bulk of her scenes thereafter finding ways to break off her engagement before becoming the beneficiary of a Roland Emmerich trope and getting to have a relationship with Captain Cuck because she betrayed Serizawa's trust and helped her boyfriend convince him to use the Oxygen Destroyer on Gojira and he dies in the process. Emiko is not a grieving widow, she's an untrustworthy black widow who would be the villain in any other movie and her only reason to exist here is to mediate the contrasting ideologies of her father and love interests (which could have just as easily been conveyed if we were shown Yamane and Serizawa as colleagues rather than told) and to facilitate the movie's third act when she is traumatized into taking a side (the populist view) against those closest to her. Emiko is somehow both an audience surrogate too awful to sympathize with and a plot device whose only bare necessity (heh; Jungle Book) lies in making this movie's world conveniently small enough for the plot to function exactly as it does (all of the important characters know each other, basically, and it doesn't feel as natural of a dynamic as the crew and found family would in Minus One almost seventy years later).
That said, Gojira's reveal is built up really well (despite knowing what I was in for, I was able to get into the mindset of a 1950s audience member who would have been going into this relatively blind, and appreciate the suspense and mystery of it all), the carnage of his rampages (brought to life by the tokusatsu effects—yes, I know I'm being bilingually redundant—of Eiji Tsubaraya and the suit acting of Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka) straddles the line between nostalgically goofy and impressive for its time, and I was both shocked and again impressed by how bleak and graphic the film was allowed to be for its time of release.
For casual kaiju fans, the movie really takes its time getting to "the good part" (and the human of most interest in the human interest plot is terribly unlikable and could have been entirely left out with a few minor tweaks to the script), but it gets its point across with visceral artistic flair and a pioneer spirit of genre-defining ingenuity, and gave audiences of the day (the West would also get an Americanized edit with Perry Mason playing a reporter named Steve Martin in 1956) a compelling, atypical hero in Dr. Serizawa (particularly in the West, said audiences grew up with films where the mad scientist was the villain, thanks to studios like Universal and Hammer popularizing Frankenstein, and the 1950s being a decade when science fiction and horror often blurred together). I want to rate Gojira higher because of its historical significance and rhetorical artistry, but for previously mentioned reasons (just Emiko, really), I didn't find it nearly as enjoyable to watch as the franchise's latest entry.
B
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Out.
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