Godzilla vs the American Disaster Movie

Warning: This whole post is riddled with spoilers of Godzilla (1954), Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and Independence Day (1996).

I just caught the tail-end of Godzilla (1954), the original Japanese language version, not to be confused with Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956), the English-dubbed American version with Raymond Burr. The difference between the two is mainly that Godzilla (1954) is a great movie, while Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956) is laughably bad.

Of course, the real difference between the two is what was added and removed between the two versions. Godzilla King of the Monsters (1956) is shorter, and they cut out a half hour of really good stuff to add in Raymond Burr describing what we were already looking at and interacting with characters from the original (or the backs of Asian-American actors). So what did they remove? Well first of all they removed any reference to nuclear weapons, in the original, Godzilla is the result of testing hydrogen bombs in the Pacific. Of course mentioning nuclear weapons or radiation in the 1950s, the middle of the Cold War, would have made America look bad. 

So what else fell by the wayside in the 1956 version? How about politics? There are scenes with the wives of the sailors killed in the ship at the beginning of the movie, demanding information from the government, and saying there is a cover-up, and bureaucrats trying to protect their jobs. What about the scenes of burn wards with scores of injured people from the destruction of Tokyo? Scenes that must have been like rubbing salt in an open wound for Japanese audiences, who would still remember the bombing of their cities in World War II. There is even a short scene with a mother and her two small children watching the city burn and her telling her children that they would soon be with their dead father. All of this was removed to make Godzilla 1956 a sanitary American film. In short, what was removed from Godzilla 1954 to make Godzilla 1956, human suffering. 

I thought about this before but it came to me seeing it again. Godzilla (1954) is a disaster movie, but it is way different than American disaster movies. In American disaster movies human suffering is limited to the loved ones lost to the main characters of the movie, while the wholesale slaughter of hundreds maybe thousands of people is glorified by massive special effects.

Let's look at The Poseidon Adventure (1972). Here you have a cruise ship, I'm just guessing at the capacity of the Poseidon, but the Queen Mary had a passenger capacity of almost 2,000 people and a crew of over a thousand. I would guess that the Poseidon would be comparable, so let's say there were three thousand people on the Poseidon. In the movie, only six people survived, and of those six, three lost loved ones. But if you think about it that means that roughly 3,000 people also died. Yet we don't really see them except for a handful of shots. The focus is on the main characters who lost people. Of the 3,000, many would have died in the first few minutes after that one special effects shot of the ship capsizing. Do we see this? In a rapid montage, yes. Do we feel their deaths? Not so much.

Even the title of the film, The Poseidon Adventure, is a misnomer. Is this really an adventure, 3,000 dead and only six survive? And of those six, half lost close family members. Boy howdy, I'd like to go on an adventure like that.

Now let's look at a more modern film. Independence Day (1996) takes the exact same approach as The Poseidon Adventure. Wholesale slaughter on a huge scale but the human suffering is only what we see through the eyes of the main characters. On top of this, the scale in Independence Day is enormous. The aliens destroy almost every major city before we figure out how to defeat them. Presumably millions have died, but that's okay because the special effects were really cool. All of those great explosions, the capital building being blown up, great stuff. But what's really happening in those massive special effects, thousands people are dying, possibly millions. And that's what we see on the trailer. That's what they used to sell the movie. And the human suffering? Bill Pullman loses his wife. And Randy Quaid's kids have to watch their father die as a hero to save the world.

Back to Godzilla 1954, like in an American film, we still get the human suffering of the main characters losing loved ones. But we also get human suffering on a large scale, hospital burn wards jammed with patients, and on a small scale, a mother telling her children that they will soon be with their dead father, things almost entire absent in an American disaster film.

What about the message of the American films? The capsizing of a cruise ship where thousands died and only half dozen survive is an adventure. And if aliens ever come down here, we're going to kick their ass, thanks to good old American know-how. 

And what is the message of Godzilla 1954? Well obviously Godzilla represents the hydrogen bomb, and the film-makers are warning us of the dangers of the path we are on. A path that it pains me to say we are still on today with our reality-show billionaire president and Rocket Man in North Korea bragging about how big their buttons are like a couple of teenage boys comparing their junk in the showers in gym class.

If all you know of Godzilla is the Raymond Burr sanitized for America version, the campy sequels, or the bad American remakes, you really need to see, Godzilla (1954). Yes, the miniatures and special effects look pretty bad, but there is a night-time attack on Tokyo, where the shadows make the monster look almost decent, I mean, considering it's just a guy in a rubber suit. But more importantly, it gives a sense of the disaster from multiple perspectives and says something about the dangers of nuclear weapons, from a country brought to its knees by those weapons, and to date, the only country to ever feel their wrath first hand. It's a great film.