"Gojira vs. Godzilla" - My essay for school on 1954 vs. 1998

[omgitsgodzilla]

This is the rough draft of my essay for my AP Language and Comprehension class. We were told to write an essay comparing and contrasting a book and a movie or a movie and its remake or reboot. I chose to write mine on the 1954 Godzilla film vs. the 1998 atrocity. I thought it would be a good thing to post here. Hope you guys enjoy it; I'll be posting the final draft once it's finished.

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Gojira vs. Godzilla

“Most of the public, used to watching the hokey Japanese [Godzilla movies], will be thinking of men in suits and bad models, a kind of dinosaur hybrid who lumbers about in a semi-comical fashion trashing Lego buildings…” In one sentence, Dean Devlin sums up the source of the differences between the classic Japanese anti-nuclear allegory Gojira from 1954 and the American remake, which he produced. On the one hand, he states the difference between the audience that saw the original film as it first ran from reel to reel at its Tokyo premiere in November, 1954 and the audience that saw his remake as it rode into multiplexes on a tidal wave of publicity during the Memorial Day weekend of 1998. On the other hand, his appraisal of the source material from which he worked while making his film with director Roland Emmerich betrays something more – Devlin doesn’t seem to understand the Japanese Godzilla films any better than his audience. This quote reveals the true source of the many differences between the original Gojira and its American counterpart: the cultures in which each was created and consumed – one a small nation still recovering from a war that left it in ruins as well as a weapon that scarred it forever, the other a market whose chiefly capitalistic driving forces led to films aimed at the wallets of the broadest possible audience – were completely different, and were targeted in ways just as different.

Take, for instance, the most obvious, glaring discrepancy between the two films: the design of the titular character. Though both incarnations of Godzilla, like most of the differing aspects of these movies, have some surface similarities, in most other ways they could not be more different. The original Godzilla was massive – not merely large, but substantial and imposing. Its physical form conveyed its function as a walking metaphor for the atomic bomb – cataclysmically destructive and unstoppable. It walked upright, like contemporary depictions of tyrannosaurs or other theropod dinosaurs, towering over its victims much like a mushroom cloud. This saurian appearance even had meaning – its kind had been alive since long before the first humans existed, and had been turned into a horrifying destructive force by humankind's experimentation with the atom, just like nuclear energy. Its draconic facial features also alluded to Japanese and East Asian mythology, mirroring how nuclear weapons and technology would become a similarly influential force in the future of Japan's culture and consciousness to mythology in centuries past. Even the appearance of the suit used to portray the creature was rich with symbolism, and was a powerful metaphor for the bomb without ripping open scars that had scarcely had time to heal. The American Godzilla, however, was not so deep a creation. It was a simple mutated marine iguana, scaled up and endowed with a mix of dinosaurian and anthropomorphic traits. It is slim to the point of appearing almost emaciated next to its inspiration. Its posture and movement also resemble that of the current depictions of dinosaurs: it leans very far forward, nearly horizontal, and runs at high speeds, recalling the tyrannosaur of Jurassic Park more than that of the 1950s. One could say the same thing about either film as one would say about its respective creature: the original is a thought-provoking, symbolic diamond in the rough, while the newer monster is a sleek, modern creation designed for marketability.

Even more different from the original is the behavior of the remake's Godzilla. Though the American Godzilla once again shares some superficial traits with the original, such as sinking ships and emerging on land to bring chaos to its country's largest city as well as destruction to its iconic landmarks, there are still extremely telling changes made to its personality. The original, a personification of sorts of a nuclear apocalypse, was as deadly and effective a destroyer as could likely be imagined in its time. This Godzilla appears in downtown Tokyo for no reason other than to kill. It lacks any apparent motivation for doing so, and it destroys indiscriminately. Most importantly, it is almost completely indestructible. It is entirely impervious to conventional weapons – it takes artillery shells, missiles and machine gun fire in stride and destroys entire battalions of tanks with the same ease as so many office buildings torn to the ground or civilians trampled beneath its feet. It only retreats into Tokyo Bay after the city is almost completely decimated. Much like that of the atom bomb, Godzilla's destruction of Japan's metropolitan areas in the original film is absolute and impossible to halt once it has started, calling to mind the image of a malevolent god. The 1998 Godzilla seems to take all of these awe-inspiring traits and head off in the exact opposite direction. This creature's destructive tendencies seem to mostly be the by-products of a frightened, confused animal trying to navigate a completely alien environment – it is a biological classification short of literally being a fish out of water. Its motivations are also explicitly pointed out in the film. It has not appeared in New York City to destroy its inhabitants, but rather, in a sense, to add to them. Where the original Godzilla wiped out the then-famous Nichigeki Theater – ironically, the site of that film's premiere – with a swipe of its tail, this one arrives at the somewhat similar-looking Madison Square Garden – also the venue for its vehicle's premiere – with a different plan. It builds a colossal nest in and around the building. Its previous attacks on fishing vessels are revealed to be for the purpose of feeding its young once they have hatched. Additionally, its response to the military is as disappointingly unlike the original as everything else. The original obliterated the Japanese Self-Defense Force's offensive efforts, forcing them to shift their focus to fighting the fires raging through multiple districts of Tokyo. Devlin and Emmerich's Godzilla responds to the military's countermeasures in the same way almost every time it is confronted: it runs away. Godzilla's encounters with the United States National Guard are an endless series of hasty retreats. This appears to have been for a good reason – the armed forces finally dispatch the monster by trapping it in the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge and firing a total of twelve missiles into its sides. As opposed to the original creature's insatiable appetite for destruction and invulnerability, the American Godzilla is a weak animal that only seeks a nesting ground and food for its offspring. This approach appeals to a demand for "realism" by modern audiences that the original film does not always meet, and caters to an appetite for fast-paced chases and an inability to conceive of something the United States armed forces cannot destroy.

These differences all point to a larger difference between the 1954 and 1998 films. Though both present Godzilla as an irradiated mutant created by nuclear weapons testing, this origin and its implications are handled in extremely different ways from one film to the other – specifically, the nuclear connection is the entire point of the Japanese film, while it is little more than a plot device in the American version. The original film focused on the horrific damage to the Japanese people Godzilla left in its wake. Godzilla emits a concentrated blast of atomic energy, a focused nuclear explosion, perhaps, from his mouth at many points during his attack on Tokyo, and people are seen incinerated by it en masse. People die on-screen in this film more frequently than in any of the twenty-seven Japanese sequels that followed, and repeated references are made to the completeness of Tokyo's destruction. The slow pans across the devastated cityscape following Godzilla's return to the ocean closely resemble photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombings nine years earlier. The issue of nuclear testing is presented much differently in the American remake, however. To be more precise, it is treated as essentially a non-issue. Stock footage of nuclear tests plays during the opening credits, and is intercut with similarly aged and sepia-toned original shots of marine iguanas, explicitly showing the audience where this Godzilla came from. One survivor from a ship sunk by the animal is shown by a Geiger counter test to be radioactive, but shows no signs of radiation sickness, and after ominously uttering the name "Gojira" when asked what he saw, he is never addressed again, except for a recorded video clip of the same scene appearing in a few more places throughout the movie. Godzilla himself lacks the atomic "breath" of the original monster, and the destruction he leaves behind is minimal by comparison – being, after all, largely accidental. The apocalyptic imagery of the original nuclear allegory is nowhere to be found, making the film easier for a target audience in a country whose foreign policy regularly involved threats of nuclear bombings to digest.

This difference in treatment of the nuclear theme also affects the overall tone and the endings to either movie. In each there is a monster on the loose, a scientist and a love interest trying to stop it, and an ending where though the creature is dead, the possibility of another wreaking havoc in the near future is still present. The original explores the effect of such circumstances on people in depth, with the lead scientist character, Dr. Serizawa, having invented a chemical weapon, the Oxygen Destroyer, that is far worse than the hydrogen bomb, but could be the only hope of destroying Godzilla. His love interest Emiko – unrequited, and engaged to him through a family arrangement years prior – must decide whether to break her promise not to tell anyone about this invention and enlist her lover Ogata to convince Serizawa to allow the use of his weapon against Godzilla. Both agonize at length over these choices, and their final decisions are both influenced by the sight of the wreckage left by Godzilla. Emiko decides to tell Ogata of the Oxygen Destroyer after volunteering to help at an emergency hospital, and Serizawa relents and allows its use after seeing a television broadcast of a children's choir singing a prayer for peace over footage of Tokyo in flames. The original film also explores the larger-scale elements of the story in a somber, almost documentary fashion. The scenes in the emergency hospital are not the brief wide and medium shots one might expect from a typical disaster film. Instead, these scenes linger on the dead and dying, panning across long rows of people lying on the floor in stretchers and depicting a young girl being tested for radiation. Unlike the scene with the old man in the American film, where his radioactivity serves merely to confirm that he has come in contact with Godzilla, this scene deals with the consequences of such exposure directly – the Geiger counter crackles loudly as it is passed in front of the girl, and a solemn, wordless look is exchanged between Emiko and the doctor performing the test. In this moment, a silent gesture conveys with absolute certainty that this girl, no older than six or seven years old, is going to die. At the end, after the Oxygen Destroyer is deployed and Godzilla asphyxiates and liquefies along with every other living thing in Tokyo Bay, Emiko's father Dr. Yamane warns those around him that Godzilla was likely not the only creature of its kind, and that another could appear if nuclear testing continues, a metaphorical plea for the world to prevent further death and destruction by nuclear war. In Devlin and Emmerich's remake, the presumably catastrophic death toll of the disaster is almost completely ignored, with the focus instead shifted to spectacular property damage to New York City's numerous famous landmarks. Ironically, much of this damage is caused by the military, as they almost completely fail to score one direct hit on Godzilla until the very end, resulting in such computer-generated eye candy as errant missiles breaking the top of the Chrysler building off and sending it plunging into the street below. Devlin and Emmerich have created a blockbuster popcorn action movie rather than a serious examination of what its events would really entail. The characters, too, lack the depth and complexity of the original's, as well as their relevance to the plot. Matthew Broderick stars as a slightly awkward, nerdy lead scientist whose main purpose is to provide the audience with an occasional bit of exposition. Maria Pitillo plays his love interest, an aspiring reporter who steals classified videotapes pertaining to Godzilla's origins in order to obtain an exclusive story. All this is really only in the script in order to get Broderick fired by the military, which gets him into a cab with Jean Reno, here portraying a French secret agent who forcibly enlists Broderick to help destroy the nest at Madison Square Garden – in order to cover up France's involvement in Godzilla's creation, supposedly as a result of nuclear testing in French Polynesia, which makes the film palatable to American audiences by placing the blame on someone else where the original pointed no fingers at all – in order to set up action scenes involving hordes of baby Godzillas that bear a suspicious resemblance to Jurassic Park's velociraptors. In short, the characters are bland archetypes who only really affect the film's most infamously unnecessary subplot. The scenes of human activity serve mostly as padding, cinematic elevator music to which the audience can clear its head after one action scene in preparation for the next. The ending is a generic sequel hook without even the metaphorical justification of the original film's closing scene. A single surviving egg hatches in the smoldering ruins of Madison Square Garden, the newborn baby Godzilla roars at the audience and the film cuts to black as the credits roll and the film's promotional tie-in single, an odd collaboration between rapper Puff Daddy and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, begins to play. The whole affair is mindless and demands almost nothing of its audience in the way of critical thinking or even attention to the plot. Godzilla is nothing more or less the perfect popcorn movie, as Devlin and Emmerich have both said it was intended to be.

All of these differences, in reality variations on many of the same ideas, show that they were made by very different filmmakers for very different audiences. Ishiro Honda, the director of Gojira, had been drafted into the Japanese army during World War II and held as a prisoner of war in China after the war ended. He had seen the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and the fire raids on Tokyo upon returning to Japan. He then spent several years working as an assistant director under the famous Akira Kurosawa. As a result, he made a very serious, thoughtful and dark film for a country still recovering from the effects of the atom bomb and still struggling with its implications for international relations. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich were action filmmakers fresh off of big-budget spectacles such as Stargate and Independence Day, so they made another slick, simplistic and stylish action film. Each film did well with its target audience: Gojira's bold allegory and stirring depictions of the effects of a nuclear holocaust made it a success with many critics and art-film lovers, earning it a home video edition in the prestigious Criterion Collection. Many of the sort of filmgoers targeted by Godzilla, however, would fault Gojira for focusing too much on the human characters, lots of slow buildup and slightly dated special effects. They point out the flashier, more seamless effects and frequent action scenes as proof of Godzilla's superiority. The same critics and art-house aficionados who loved Gojira, in turn, point out Godzilla's shallow plot and characters as well as its departure from its supposed source material as fatal flaws. These differences exist because of the intentions behind the films, and their reception by the target audience of both shows that each succeeded in its own way.

[Space Hunter M]

A nice, entertaining read right there. I guess I should just let it speak for itself.

[G-Matt]

That was very well written. Some of the paragraphs were quite long (especially the second-to-last one), so you might want to consider shortening the text a little bit in the final draft.

[omgitsgodzilla]

Yes, I agree about the paragraph length. I'm going to wait for my teacher's verdict on this draft before I get down to editing though.

Funny thing is, I never really realized how much symbolism one could find just in the suit design until I started writing about it. Crazy shit.

[Mincecraft]

This...speaks...so...much...truth. Another great shot at D&E for their screw-up, and probably explains the problem with filmaking today.

[omgitsgodzilla]

Wow, thanks guys! I'm really glad you enjoy this so much.

LC, I agree on the suspense thing. There's hardly any atmosphere or buildup in movies these days. I saw Paranormal Activity 4 the other day and I was astounded at how bad it was - startles and jumpscares the entire time. And so much else was just so poorly done. It was especially disappointing since there are people like the guys making Marble Hornets out there who are doing work that's so much better, so much more suspenseful, and so much more terrifying with almost no money, and far more of a minimalist approach. And yet they're the ones doing YouTube series in their spare time and making perhaps a small amount of money from a small amount of merchandise few people know exists, while the people who made PA4 are the ones making multi-million dollar movies and tons of money.

[omgitsgodzilla]

That was actually the first slendervlog I found. Not as good as MH in my opinion, but when Adam is good, he's great. The last video was really heavy and he nailed it.

[Rody]

That is an excellent essay, if you ask me! I would recommend passing this around somehow.

[Mr. X]

Fantastic, man, simply fantastic! You better get an A+++ for this.

[omgitsgodzilla]

Rody - Thanks! I was thinking about it myself; any suggestions as to how?

Mr. X - Citizen Kane applause gif. Shit just got real.

[Julia Bristow]

@OMGitsGodzilla your essay is pretty well written and it does a good job of explaining the original Godzilla & the 1998 film. It does get the point across that both films work very well for different audiences.

[Rody]

^ Unfortunately, no, I don't really know any ways myself - although perhaps you could ask Uncanny Studios to share it on Skreeonk.

[Godzilla2000Zero]

With this great essay you might actually create some new Godzilla fans

[omgitsgodzilla]

Sydney - Thank you! I was hoping I could get across the gist of each film effectively without full-on synopses of each, just saying enough to make my point without requiring the reader to have seen the movies. Glad that worked.

Rody - That's actually a good idea. I should do that.

Godzilla2000Zero - I hope that happens. I wasn't necessarily aiming that high, I mostly wanted to explain how and why these films are so different and to give people a better understanding of the original. If it does make some new fans, though, that's excellent!

[tymon]

I really dug it. Some very good points, and well-written all around.

[omgitsgodzilla]

Well, my English teacher gave back the essay, graded. There were some complaints (paragraphing, imagine that), but overall she enjoyed it and she expressed interest in seeing the original. So today I gave her my Criterion DVD edition to watch. I think I may have made somewhat of a fan with this thing. Feels good.

[G-Matt]

^That's great to hear.