FIRST: A WARNING. SPOILERS ARE USED THROUGHOUT THIS PIECE
Since the age of 7, I've always
had a close relationship with the character of Godzilla. I remember the first
time I saw the original 1954 film Gojira I was both awe-stricken and terrified. As I grew older, Godzilla became a
character that I would consistently revisit, and over time built a reverence
not just for the great, radioactive dinosaur, but for the films themselves. Godzilla, in his
first incarnation is widely interpreted as a symbolic representation of the unprecedented carnage caused by the
dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese people
were utterly devastated as they coped with a massive tragedy that has never been
seen before or since; That is, the use of nuclear weapons on masses of civilians.
Over time,
Godzilla evolved in Japanese cinema from a harbinger of destruction to a hero
and protector. He would come to save the
people of Japan and their cities as opposed to demolishing them. Perhaps this is because the Japanese
were able to transcend the long-lasting effects of Fat Man and Little Boy, and
in doing so, Godzilla became a symbol of Japanese resilience and strength.
Gareth
Edwards’ box-office smash and critical success Godzilla is a film filled with spectacle and earth-shattering destruction.
Edwards and his team capture the devastation with precision and great attention
to detail. Throughout the film, there are numerous allusions to many recent,
real-world tragedies, from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina to the Fukushima nuclear
power plant disaster caused by a tsunami in 2011.
While this
imagery is effective in depicting a massive loss of human life, the monsters
responsible for this devastation are ambiguous in their representation. The
viewer is told though Ken Watanabe’s character that this is the same monster
from the 1954 film. He pulls out a charred pocket watch owned by his father, Daisuke Serizawa, a central character of the
1954 film. The watch itself is symbolic of the bombings on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki; there are many watches in museums that still hold the time of 8:15,
the exact moment the bombs were dropped. Godzilla in the 2014 version is
therefore is a direct by-product of the American bombings on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
This is
where the film feels careless in its depiction of the creature. Godzilla was a
character that represented a distinctly Japanese criticism of the United States
using atomic weapons on its people. Yet, in the latest Godzilla entry, he seems
to be a weapon utilized by the United States to combat a new species of giant
monsters. More over, at the end of the film, the giant behemoth responsible for
the loss of countless lives and annihilation of entire cities gets a curtain
call as he strolls back into the sea. A shot of a television screen showing a
news program flaunts a headline reading
“King of The Monsters—Savior of Our City?”
In America, the stories of the Japanese (both foreign and domestic) during World War II have been glossed over or completely ignored. With
the Executive Order 9066, Franklin D. Roosevelt uprooted over 100,000 Japanese
Americans from their homes, and moved them into internment camps. In Japan, the
United States dropped two atomic bombs and killed hundreds of thousands (most
of them women and children, as soldiers were fighting in WWII).
When this film was first
announced, I was ecstatic. There’s a great opportunity to explore American accountability as well as the justifications for dropping weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, Godzilla becomes a
run-of-the-mill summer popcorn flick that avoids any of the big questions. It
takes no risks and has little to say. Some may find the film insulting. For the Japanese to evolve Godzilla from a hellish, destructive
beast to an eventual hero is their choice. However, the recent American film, which was
heavily supported by the United States Armed Forces (Edwards and his team
received a tour of the Pentagon, used military vehicles and aircraft, soldiers
etc.) acts as a passive justification for the use of atomic weaponry employed against
the Japanese during World War II.
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