Godzilla

MOVIE #1,696 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 06.05.24 Well this is a big one... PUN INTENDED! We're talking about the big guy today. The print I watched (print, lol… digital file from Internet Archive — I don't care about fidelity for the most part, if you don't know now you know) is the original with English subtitles. One thing that’s gonna come up constantly in this Kaiju series is that a lot of the films have various versions, with American cuts often featuring dubbed dialogue and other changes. Like I'm doing with Miyazaki, I'll try to mostly watch the original films in their original language, but I'll also break that rule whenever because I'm a freaking rebel, baby. This is MY cinema, y'all…

Bit slow getting going with a lotta screaming people in this and the damn ‘Zilla ain't even nowhere in sight. First appearance is a puppet, not a man in a suit I think. Boooo!

45 minutes in, the big guy finally makes landfall and it's worth the wait. It's fun to think about all the time and painstaking effort that went into creating all these detailed miniatures just so they could be completely trashed. I enjoyed this quite a bit. It's probably not fair to stack it up against Kong (came out more than 20 years earlier, uses stop-motion not man-in-suit tech, one film is covertly racist and the other is overtly antiwar, etc.), but seeing how "Godzilla vs. Kong" is all the rage these days, I gotta hand it to King Kong on a pure visceral enjoyment level. To each their own, though. This is definitely still a classic.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,695 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,697 ⫸

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Godzilla (Japanese: ゴジラ, Hepburn: Gojira) is a 1954 Japanese epic kaiju film directed and co-written by Ishirō Honda, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. Produced and distributed by Toho Co., Ltd., it is the first film in the Godzilla franchise. The film stars Akira Takarada, Momoko Kōchi, Akihiko Hirata, and Takashi Shimura, with Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka as Godzilla. In the film, Japan's authorities deal with the sudden appearance of a giant monster, whose attacks trigger fears of nuclear holocaust in post-war Japan. It was released on October 27, 1954.