Thriller Films

"Haruo Nakajima — Godzilla"

"Yasuko Sawaguchi — Erika Shiragami"

"Yoshifumi Tajima — Minister of the Environment Hidaka"

"Kenpachiro Satsuma — Godzilla"

"The Two Mightiest Monsters Of All Time!"

"For the rebirth of the Godzilla legend, Toho decided to once again portray the King of the Monsters as an evil creature. Thus the 1984 Godzilla would possess the general appearance of the 1954 Godzilla (from Godzilla, King of the Monsters) and the facial expression of the 1964 Godzilla (from Godzilla vs. the Thing), the latter incarnation being arguably the most evil-looking version of Godzilla up to that time. The 1984 Godzilla suit therefore possessed features previously seen only on the 1954 and 1955 (Godzilla Raids Again) suits; fangs, four toes, ears, staggered rows of dorsal plates, and a rough underside of the tail. The detailing in the legs for the 1984 Godzilla was very good, but the musculature for the chest and shoulders were less well-defined, thus diminishing the costume’s overall image of power. The dorsal plates were very well-detailed, but also appeared to be more numerous compared to the 1954 and 1955 costumes. The largest dorsal plate was placed at waist level, which had not been done before or since. The tail was longer than any previous version, the neck was short and the head was fairly large in proportion to the body. The 1964-style eyes, with red-brown irises, looked suitably evil. The 1984 costume also boasted a new feature for a Godzilla suit; the upper lip could curl up in snarl. It was so advanced, one might think it could even read a 3D barcode."

"Eitaro Ozawa — Minister of Finance Kanzaki"

"Hiroshi Koizumi — Professor Minami"

"The most colossal conflict the screen has ever known!"

"Mizuho Suzuki — Minister of Foreign Affairs Seiichi Emori"

"Shin Takuma — Hiroshi Okamura"

"Taketoshi Naito — Chief Cabinet Secretary Takegami"

"Tadao Nakamaru — Chief Interpol Tagawa"

"The 1989 Godzilla featured a triangular build, with stocky legs recalling the 1962 Godzilla. The chest and shoulders featured pronounced musculature, which gave the 1989 Godzilla a very powerful appearance. The number of dorsal plates was reduced, but oddly the largest plate placed at shoulder level. The tail was shorter than the previous suit and the underside was smooth, in common with all Godzilla suits from 1962 to 1975. The other features of the 1984 Godzilla, such as the fangs, ears and four toes were all retained. The neck of the 1989 Godzilla was longer and the size of the head reduced. The face was changed radically, and featured a fierce expression with several new features; a feline-like upper lip, multiple rows of shark-like teeth and eyes with large, brown irises and very little white showing. The new face added much to Godzilla’s evil personality, making the King of the Monsters appear fiercer and more dragon-like than before. It also made him look more intelligent, as it seems like he would even know how to make a QR code."

"Nadao Kirino — General's aide"

"Nothing Like This Ever On the Screen!"

"Hollywood ultimately sought to sanitize the movie and deflect blame from the U.S. bombings, Tsutsui said. “Certainly all the pieces that were in any way, could in any way be construed as critical of the United States or atomic testing, were really stricken from the film,” Tsutsui said. “So the deep political meaning and a lot of the heart of the original 'Godzilla' was cut out for American audiences.” Kazu Watanabe, head of film at the Japan Society, had similar thoughts, saying that the U.S. adaptation contributed to the distorted, skewed views that Americans had of Japan at the time. “These 'Godzilla' films were not received in the same way in general — in Japan the early films were big budget, major studio films featuring some recognizable stars, while in the U.S. they were more like lowbrow B-movie Japanese monster movie genre fare with funny dubbing that fed into an Orientalist understanding of Japanese culture in America at large,” he said. The way in which the movie went through another layer of censorship before it was presented to American audiences, Tsutsui explained, shows just how sensitive people were to the inherent inhumanity of the atomic bombings. “They worked hard to protect the American public from the truth that really the Americans who watched the film never had a chance to respond to it in a meaningful way.”"

"The original idea was to find something that could match Godzilla's power and terror if we were bringing back Godzilla. But simply letting the monsters fight each other had been done many times and, clearly, there was a limit to it. So in order to bring back Godzilla properly we had to create an opponent that can fight properly. If there was something equivalent to the terror of nuclear power it must be the bio-technology which human beings would manipulate life, because it can be very dangerous if it goes the wrong way, ethically, I guess. That's where I found the connection, so the idea of a monster was created by biotechnology was born."

"Your favorite fire-breathing monster…Like you've never seen him before!"

"The Legend Is Reborn."

"When outlets like The New York Times reviewed the film in 1956, it was described as “in the category of cheap cinematic horror-stuff and it is too bad that a respectable theatre has to lure children and gullible grown-ups with such fare.” The deliberate aesthetic choices that the original filmmakers made on the creature’s keloid-like scars were even interpreted as low-budget Japanese filmmaking with critics at the time likening the monster to a “miniature of a dinosaur made of gum-shoes and about $20 worth of toy buildings and electric trains.”"

"The movie served as a strong political statement, representative of the traumas and anxieties of the Japanese people in an era when censorship was extensive in Japan because of the American occupation of the country after the war ended, Tsutsui said. The screen depicted what many could not explicitly say."

"“As the Americans did with many Japanese soldiers coming back to the homeland, they had them land in Hiroshima so the Japanese soldiers would see how thoroughly defeated Japan had been,” Tsutsui said. “It had a lifetime impact on him the horrors of what he saw, and he decided that he had an opportunity with this movie to set an important political message.”"

"Yoshifumi Tajima — Kumayama"

"Ken Tanaka — Goro Maki"

"Yū Fujiki — Nakamura"

"When the monster Godzilla, or “Gojira,” appeared before Japanese movie audiences in 1954, many left the theaters in tears. The fictional creature, a giant dinosaur once undisturbed in the ocean, was depicted in the original film as having been aggravated by a hydrogen bomb. Its heavily furrowed skin or scales were imagined to resemble the keloid scars of survivors of the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Japan nine years earlier to end World War II. American audiences, however, had the opposite reaction, finding comedic value in what many interpreted as a cheesy monster movie. “Most Americans think if you left the movie in tears, it was just because you laughed so hard,” William Tsutsui, author of “Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters,” told NBC Asian America. The stark contrast reflects how Hollywood took the Japanese concept and scrubbed it of its political message before presenting it to American audiences to deflect from the U.S. decision to drop the bombs, critics say."

"Godzilla was the most masterful of all dinosaur movies because it made you believe it was really happening."

"Yoshio Kosugi — Infant Island Chief"

"Kenzo Tabu — politician"

"Godzilla, both the character and the film, are a reflection on the Japanese experience at the end of World War II: destruction beyond imagining, and a lurking sense that “We brought this on ourselves” somehow, even without meaning to. In the film we see both the guilt, the feeling that the punishment perhaps outweighs the sin, and the striving for redemption, all of which are typical for such stories. In some ways, there’s a similar arc in the origin of Spider-Man: radioactive accidental origin, great power used without regard for consequence (personal profit for Spidey), punishment out of proportion (the death of Uncle Ben), and eventual redemption as a hero."

"Take Godzilla - from a narrative point of view, its origin was other giant beast movies, like King Kong or some of Ray Harryhausen's work. The first Godzilla film was a very dark, deep piece of filmmaking - almost disturbing in a way. But the love the country and the kids felt for the creature literally evolved Godzilla into a national hero."

""Godzilla" is Mr. Honda's most personal film by far. And you can see the imprint that the war left on him. He worked personally on the script, you know, and he spoke many, many times over the years about how his desire for this film, while it was an entertainment film, by and large, but his desire was to send a message, not an indictment of America, the monster really - that's another difference between "Godzilla" and American monster movies of the same time period. The American monsters usually are stand-ins, as I said, for Cold War enemies. Godzilla is not really a stand-in for America. It is more of an indictment of the nuclear age. And Honda's hope was that somehow this film would inspire people to think about disarmament. I think today if he were still alive, he'd be very disappointed that, you know, nuclear weapons are possessed by more nations than ever before."

"[in a note] Dear Glenn: When you receive this letter I shall have been eliminated for disobeying the directives of our computers. But I have no regrets. With you I have found a love beyond all computation."

"Yasuko Sawaguchi — Naoko Okamura"

"Widely regarded as the best Godzilla suit of all time, the Mosugoji was as different from the Kingoji as the Kingoji was from its two predecessors. The body of the Mosugoji was sleek and bell-shaped with a pronounced breast bone and knees. The hands featured slender, sharp claws with the fingers held apart, which looked like they could tear the nicest high-rise OC apartments to ribbons. The dorsal plates were nearly identical to those of the Kingoji. The head was well proportioned to the body and the facial features were chillingly defined, with pronounced brows and splendidly evil eyes."

"About 9.6 million Japanese flocked to the theaters to see “Gojira” when it was released, out of a population of 88 million. Though initially critics panned the film as too Hollywood-esque, it became an increasingly popular hit, and would go down in history as one of Japan’s greatest movies. Produced near the beginning of a golden age in Japanese film—the same decade saw the release of classics like “Seven Samurai,” “Ikiru” and “Rashomon”—“Gojira” marked Japan’s return to the international stage after World War II, paving the way to its hosting of the Olympics in 1964 and the economic boom that would make it a major player on the world stage again."

"The original 1954 Japanese film, Gojira was iconic, and only made a couple mistakes of any significance. (1) They killed him in the end, and we saw his body turned to skeleton. Not the best way to begin 60 years worth of sequels. (2) Godzilla was depicted as a dinosaur, and was associated with living trilobites. Even if there was some sort of ‘realm that time forgot’ out in the Pacific somewhere, Trilobites were already extinct before the first dinosaurs, and Godzilla was clearly no dinosaur. The conceptual artists reportedly referenced illustrations of dinosaurs, but that’s not what they rendered. All bi-pedal dinosaurs [Therapods] were digigrade, walking on their toes, like birds, and usually only three or four digits. Godzilla was plantigrade and pentadactyle, (having five digits and walking on the whole foot) just like lizards. It even looks like a lizard, apart from the fact that no reptile has an actual nose or external ears. In a sense, what Toho pictures created was actually an oriental dragon. These tend to mix reptilian and mammalian traits. Amusingly in 1954, Toho made a giant lizard and called it a dinosaur. In 1998, Tristar re-designed Godzilla as a dinosaur, but called it a lizard. Of course that wasn’t the only thing Tristar did wrong. They tried to ruin the monster completely. They took away the only thing that worked in decades of sequels, the look of the monster itself. Then they took away everything that made Godzilla appealing to Kaiju fans, then they tied it down and shot it. Such disrespect. If you’re going to make a movie that already has a fan-base, and they are the ones who will decide whether your film will pay off, respect those fans and the story they’re paying to see."

"In the original, surprisingly solemn “Godzilla,” the monster was bottom-heavy. “It was the first costume they made, so they really hadn’t worked out the technology of it,” Mr. Tsutsui said in a phone interview. The costume’s framework was wire and bamboo strips, with latex around those elements. “There wasn’t much expressive possibility in that early monster, which I think captured some of the majesty of Godzilla.” With dorsal fins and a large tail, the creature was clearly threatening. Mr. Tsutsui said his makers were influenced by illustrations of dinosaurs, including an article in Life magazine. And Godzilla’s skin reminded Mr. Tsutsui of the scar tissue on the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. In writing the new screenplay, Max Borenstein was influenced by the original. “It had all these really deep and resonant themes about nuclear disaster and the fears of the atomic bomb, which were very present only nine years after World War II,” he said by phone. “I thought, ‘We need to do what they did, use this creature as a metaphor for a fear that’s very primal.' ”"

"You might be tempted to laugh at what, by today's standards, are primitive special effects, but very soon this haunting, elegiac mood takes hold of it and you can't just laugh. It is ultimately quite sobering."

"Gen Shimizu — Minister of Defense"

"Takamaru Sasaki — Chairman of Earth Committee"

"During the U.S.-led occupation, which lasted until 1952, there was a moratorium on any press coverage dealing with the atomic aftermath in any in-depth way. The thinking was that too much attention to the atomic bombings would derail democratization efforts and would undermine U.S. authority, particularly since the U.S. had already begun using Japanese territory as a base from which to launch bombing raids on Vietnam. With the end of the occupation, some activists and journalists started to deal directly with the atomic bombings, but they were not getting much traction. People were more interested in trying to rebuild. But then there was a real game-changer. The U.S. conducted a nuclear test over the Bikini atoll and a Japanese fishing ship, the Lucky Dragon, its crew, and all their fish were exposed to the fallout radiation. When this hit the newspapers, it ignited an enormous scare, as people throughout the country feared that they had been exposed to nuclear radiation through consuming tainted fish. That was in March 1954, shortly before the release of Gojira, the opening scene of which features a fishing crew exposed to an unexplained, destructive flash of light. So, when that hit the big screens, it touched a real nerve with the Japanese public."

"The basic premise of Gojira, the original 1954 version, is that nuclear testing in the Pacific has awakened a terrible dinosaur which, in its wrath, is bent on destroying Tokyo. But, as Barak Kushner and others have noted, the film isn’t so much about destruction as it is about fear. Look at any screenshot of the movie, and pretty much every single person wears an expression of utter terror. This is true whether you’re talking about the scene where the radio reporter is declaiming into his microphone right up to the moment when the monster crushes him, or you’re talking about quieter scenes with the scientist in his lab."

"Koji Uno — Namikawa's associate"

"Kenzo Tabu — Commander from Planet X, Earth Unit"

"Seen in context, Godzilla is not really a futuristic sci-fi fantasy, it's a very real reflection of contemporary terror drawn from contemporary events."

"Along with King Kong, Godzilla is one of the most celebrated movie monsters of all time, yet hardly anyone in this country has seen the original that sparked the phenomenon."

"When this original version was finally shown in America last year, people flocked to see it. They said it was an expression of nuclear anxiety to rank with Dr Strangelove Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy starring Peter Sellers] and Hiroshima Mon Amour [directed by Alain Resnais in 1959]."

"It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience. Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy."