<![CDATA[Godzilla at 65: still wreaking havoc, but now a reminder of Japan's anxious past]>
He has bestridden the silver screen for 65 years, but Godzilla is showing no sign of slowing down or curbing his enthusiasm for wreaking havoc on the world and his equally monstrous enemies.
The giant lizard-like creature that first stomped out of the Pacific Ocean in 1954 celebrates the 65th anniversary of his big screen debut on Sunday. This milestone comes as his latest movie " Godzilla: King of the Monsters " racks up US$385 million in global box office takings following its release in late May.
The film, starring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown and Ken Watanabe, is the 35th title in the franchise and the third to be completely produced by a Hollywood studio. And while it might not have achieved the critical acclaim of previous Godzilla movies, it does show that this beast from the east has enduring appeal, both in the home of its creators and abroad.
"Godzilla works on a couple of levels, at least in Japan," said Kaori Shoji, a veteran film critic for The Japan Times newspaper.
"Right now, the population here is ageing very rapidly, but Godzilla reminds that generation of their lives in the 1960s and 1970s when the Godzilla movies were really popular.
Godzilla's big screen debut in 1954. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo alt=Godzilla's big screen debut in 1954. Photo: Alamy Stock Photo
"These people grew up with Godzilla " seeing him around all these years later takes them back to their childhoods.
"The children of those people are in their late 30s and 40s now, but they don't really have a character from popular culture that is as riveting as the one their parents had, so there's a kind of nostalgia for how things were coupled with fears about the problems Japan faced in the decades after the economic bubble burst," she said.
"When people have economic problems or everyday worries, they seem to want to go back a couple of decades, when things always seemed better," Shoji added. "They will say that, they may have been poorer back then, but at least they had the biggest and best monster to keep them entertained."
Even in America, which has no shortage of screen goodies and baddies, the viewing public has taken to Godzilla. But it was not always like that, Shoji said.
"For a long time, Godzilla was a bit of a joke in the United States," she explained. "I remember Billy Crystal in one of his movies making fun of millions of Japanese running around trying to get out of the way of a man in a body suit " but as the whole world got older and people realised that Godzilla wasn't going away, he suddenly became cool.
"And the longevity of the character really says a lot, I believe."
For the Japanese, Godzilla goes deep into the collective psyche of the nation.
In the original movie, directed by Ishiro Honda, Godzilla is depicted as a towering, destructive prehistoric sea monster that is awakened from his slumber beneath the sea by nuclear tests over the Pacific and then given added strength through exposure to radiation. The film came less than a decade after nuclear bombs were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the bloody crescendo to World War Two.
By chance, the movie also came out five months after another nuclear incident that shocked the Japanese public. The fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5 was operating about 20km outside a danger zone declared around Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands after the US carried out the Castle Bravo nuclear test.
The Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1954. Photo: AP alt=The Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1954. Photo: AP
The explosion caused by the detonation of a hydrogen bomb was more than twice as powerful as scientists had predicted, resulting in far more radioactive fallout and affecting an area far beyond the exclusion zone. Unaware of what had happened, the boat's 23 crew later reported scooping up the white flaky dust that fell on the ship, without realising it was from the atoll's coral reef and had absorbed high levels of radioactivity. Some recalled sticking their tongues out to taste it.
All of the crew suffered acute radiation syndrome and one man died the following month.
In a nod to the incident and its link to the film, the poster for the 2001 title Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack features an image of Godzilla coming ashore and causing mayhem at the town of Yaizu, the Lucky Dragon 5's home port.
"Godzilla comes from a very anxious time in Japan's history," said Shoji. "The nation had just been defeated in the war, the cities had been wrecked, the pollution was bad and life was hard. And the government had just decided to build the first nuclear plant. There was this fear of babies being born with two heads, of people having no hands, of the unknown.
"There was this image in popular culture that Japan was going to further disfigure itself with nuclear power, just a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that the nation's collective experience was becoming more awful.
"Godzilla was a way of laying those fears out in black and white, but the film also served to take some of the fear out of our hearts because it never materialised," she said.
A poster for the latest movie, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Photo: Warner Bros Pictures alt=A poster for the latest movie, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Photo: Warner Bros Pictures
For subsequent movies, Godzilla evolved. In his first big screen appearance, the scaly-backed beast had been 50 metres tall. He added a couple of metres in each of the Toho Millennium Series of films between 1999 and 2004, but shot up to 100 metres tall when Hollywood got its hands on the character in 2004's Zilla. By 2017, Godzilla had grown to 300 metres for Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters.
For some purists, who had grown up on the films when the sets were cardboard and the creature was a man in a suit, the scale of the lumbering lizard was a problem.
Posters on online movie sites accused Hollywood of "supersizing" their beloved protagonist, while others asked whether Godzilla had been tucking into too many pizzas and marshmallows. Another suggested he was merely experiencing some middle-age spread.
Concerns over the creature's health aside, there have been occasions when it appeared Godzilla may have roared his last.
"Godzilla became one of Japan's earliest pop culture exports, along with the films of Akira Kurosawa, in the post-war period," said Gavin Blair, Tokyo correspondent for The Hollywood Reporter.
"But it is worth noting that by the turn of the millennium, the franchise appeared to be on its last legs, and studio Toho didn't make a Godzilla film for 10 years. It was only rejuvenated by the Legendary Pictures-Warner Bros Hollywood reboot in 2014 which took over half a billion dollars worldwide.
"This prompted Toho to bring the iconic monster back in its own Shin Godzilla, which was a critical and commercial success."
And after all these years and all those movies, television series, books and animated shows, Godzilla is not yet ready to stomp off into the sunset. The next sequel, Godzilla vs Kong, is in production in Hollywood and due to be released on March 13, 2020.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2019. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
