31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 12 (Godzilla 1984)

[CRASH BANG] NUKES ARE BAD [SMASH KABOOM]

Thirty years is a hell of a long time. For me, it's literally a lifetime. For the Godzilla series, as it turns out, it was a long period with all sorts of films followed by a decade-long rest. It was a time of Ghidoras and Mechagodzillas and Jet Jaguars and whatnot, a drift away from the unholy nuclear metaphor he was to something more base; a big monster which beat the shit out of other monsters. There's nothing wrong with that, not really! It can be quite satisfying to view... but there's something to the subtle horror that Godzilla once was. The folks at Toho seemed to think so, as well. Here we are then, in 1984. Thirty years on, and the beast has once again risen from the depths. Not to fight a space dragon, not to goof around with its child... but to destroy and terrorize the horrified populace of Japan, like the stomping allegory it once was. Here, then, is Godzilla 1984.

The monster's awakening this time isn't explicitly the fault of mankind this time. In 1954 it was all of the H-bomb testing in the Bikini Atoll. In 1984, a volcano off of Daikoku Island erupts from an active volcano. It seems at first to just be an unfortunate accident, a natural disaster unleashing a calamity... but I have an alternate reading of this. Godzilla as arbiter and judge, a terror from Long Ago unleashed from the depths to judge humanity for its nuclear folly. 1954's is obvious, what with the Bikini Atoll stuff, but 1984's? It's right there in the movie. The final steps of the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union. Hell, they're both right there in the movie, their envoys arguing with the Japanese PM and all but begging to unleash nuclear hell upon Godzilla. This was jaw-droppingly idiotic to me. Kill a creature BORN from nuclear power WITH nuclear power? Utterly foolish... and as it turned out, I was right to think that. More on that in a bit. 1954's film was a sort of grieving look at how nuclear power can tear apart the world and leave a city in ruins with thousands injured or dead, ten years after that literally happened in Japan. Godzilla 1984, then, slots in nicely with other nuclear fiction of the time. It's a reminder that this is what nuclear power is built to do; level everything in its path and leave destruction in its wake, at a time when the two world superpowers were having a dick-measuring contest with the deadliest dicks in human history.


So it is, then, that Godzilla goes on a rampage through the bright and glamorous Tokyo of the 1980s, wrecking power plants and smashing trains and shrugging off pretty much every form of attack the army can throw at it. Here is where modern effects and thirty years of cinematic advance pay off, in a sense. As bad as this is supposed to be, there is still some remnant of spectacle to it. We're in color now, and there are far more explosions and things on fire and bigger buildings being smashed. The end of the world CAN look good, as Little Shop Of Horrors showed us in its original ending. Of course, there have been advances in the military as well. Their new super-duper SUPER X machine is a big flying UFO tank with lots of cool bullets, and their cadmium rounds actually do manage the seemingly impossible and make Godzilla fall on its ass. I don't know how I feel about the military actually being effective against Godzilla, but it's a moot point anyway. We don't know if the cadmium would have kept Godzilla down for good, because of more unfortunate accidents. A Soviet space nuke is launched towards Godzilla due to a mechanical fuck-up caused in Godzilla's attack, and though it's intercepted by an American nuke in the atmosphere, the fallout recharges our unstoppable lizard pal and it goes hog wild all over again. Here is where I need to bring up the Americanized version of the film, Godzilla 1985. The Americanized version of the 1954 movie was basically just an abridged version with extra material starring Raymond Burr, and still manages to retain a lot of the tone of the original. Fair enough, but Godzilla 1985 fucks it to all hell and has product placement, wisecracks, and an outright evil reworking of things. See, the Soviet nuke that goes haywire and launches? In 1984, the guy in charge of launching the nukes is beat to shit by the attack but utterly determined to stop the nuke before it fires. He doesn't make it, dying just short of the controls in a heroic last-ditch effort to stop it. In the Americanized 1985 though, the guy is literally crawling to the switch desperately in order to push it and launch the missile. Because this is an American movie and we can't bloody well portray a Commie in anything but a negative light in the era of Reagan and Red Dawn. This is vile and evil revisionism of the film's original intent, and thank god that the Blu-Ray I have doesn't include this version because that is the most sickening bullshit.


In the end, it's science that saves the day again. There's no tragedy akin to Dr. Serizawa and his weapon of mass destruction that he takes with him to the grave. This time, it's just some musings on Godzilla's evolution and bird migration and bird calls that they use to lure it into a volcano and drop it in there. Fittingly, the head scientist lost his parents in the 1954 attack and I don't recall if he was explicitly in the original film or not. Still, he's survived the initial wave. He remembers the almighty terror and works on a scientific solution to stop Godzilla, without all this dick-waving nonsense that the US and the Soviets have on hand with their orbital nuke stations. There's no real attempt made to keep the scientific breakthrough a secret, like the Oxygen Destroyer was. You know by about the halfway mark that this is going to be what kills Godzilla, simply as a savvy film watcher. Nevertheless, Godzilla 1984 works. It keeps the same spirit of the original, adding and updating its implicit metaphors for the time in which it was made while also making things a bit more of a spectacle. Godzilla would continue on and fight more weird and wild monsters, but I feel like this is where we should leave the big walking nuclear terror for our marathon. Besides, something else is lurking around the corner. Something smaller, but an unstoppable killing machine dedicated to teaching us a lesson in its own right. Look to your calenders and see what serendipity has brought us, and listen for that familiar sound once more.


Ch ch ch ch. Ah ah ah ah.