With the new Godzilla King of the Monsters (2019) film out on the Friday after I write this I thought it might be interesting for me to go over the 2014 film. After watching it again I wondered if it would be a good idea to do this… And yes it is.
Godzilla (2014) is certainly a film. To say anything more about it I need to dive head first into just what Godzilla is, it’s history and impact. So lets do that.
The original Godzilla is a film from 1954 Japan. For context this wasn’t even ten years after the end of the Second World War, and Japan had surrendered in the face of nuclear destruction. As a nation it was terrified, with good reason. A nuclear bomb, while cliche in media today is no joke. A single device destroyed a city. Killing thousands, tens of thousands in a single stroke. It’s a weapon not meant to fight wars, but to end them. Definitively. You drop a bomb that not only wipes out a city, but poisons the land causing horrible death for hundreds of years to come? You damn well better be afraid.
That’s what Godzilla, the original Godzilla, was meant to be. In the original film wherever Godzilla walked he left radiation, his shadow killed people. His shadow. A giant, unstoppable, monster created by man’s hubris wreaking havoc and destroying all it touched. Its existence a warning and terrible reminder that sometimes man’s blind ambition can lead to him toying with things beyond his control.
In a country as traumatised as Japan, and a world that was already hovering on the brink of armageddon in the form of the nuclear arms race, a film and monster like Godzilla was inevitable.
