Ishirō Honda's momentous 1954 monster film was born out of a national tragedy in Japan. It has a bleak message for humanity that goes beyond cinematic spectacle.
For some, Godzilla is the pink-finned superhero who teams up with an axe-wielding King Kong in this year's Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Others may remember it as a kindly guardian angel with laser-beam eyes and a cute nephew named Godzooky in the 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. But it started life as a very different beast. When Godzilla first reared up from the boiling ocean in 1954, it was the pitiless embodiment of nuclear devastation in a Japanese film that still stands, 70 years on, as the darkest and most sombre monster movie ever made.
To mark the anniversary, Alex Davidson curated a season of kaiju films (Japanese giant monster movies) at the Barbican Centre in London earlier this year. "The first one I saw was Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, from 1966, which has Godzilla battling a giant shrimp," Davidson tells the BBC. "I absolutely loved it – but the version I saw on Channel 4 in the 1990s had a terrible [English language] dub, and Godzilla is presented as this quite benevolent, already existing creature. It's a lot of fun, but it isn't necessarily the most serious film in the world. The following year, Channel 4 showed the first Godzilla in the original Japanese, and it was such a shock to see a film that is so beautiful and haunting and bleak."
According to kaiju lore, Godzilla is a prehistoric monster, but most fans would agree that it was born in August 1945, when US atomic bombs detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 150,000 people. "It's important for us to remember that Japan is the only nation on Earth to have directly suffered an atomic bombardment," Steven Sloss, a leading kaiju scholar, tells the BBC. "That's why, with what it explores, Godzilla is a film that only Japan could have made."