cult film freak: DIRECTOR ISHIRÔ HONDA'S 'GOJIRA' AKA THE ORIGINAL 'GODZILLA'

Title: GORJIRA/GODZILLA Year: 1954 Rating: ****1/2

Ironically, the original grainy black-and-white GODZILLA, that spawned countless colorful sequels and reboots, seems intended as a one-off, being more of a symbolic cautionary-tale presentation about the effects of using nuclear weapons in the past and testing nuclear weapons in the future...

In Japan, a prehistoric dinosaur was hibernating/surviving in a cave for millions of years... until H-bomb testing made the creature indestructible since, if a nuke doesn't kill you, it will only make you stronger...

From GORJIRA/GODZILLA

And angrier... yet there's no big final battle like later installments... the climax occurs a little over halfway through with the monster attacking power-lines, and, at one point, wise old Takashi Shimura (star of that same years' epic SEVEN SAMURAI) gives a familiar warning: that GODZILLA doesn't react well to sudden bright lights...

Same thing happened when the original KING KONG was snapped by paparazzi in New York, before destroying a train... and this train-and-city-stomping, warplane-attacked-and-attacking GODZILLA has other similarities including an island of peaceful natives who wind up basically becoming somber prisoners to the beast's impending wrath...

Akihiko Hirata in GORJIRA/GODZILLA

Meanwhile the creature itself only provides the famously distinctive roar one time (56-minutes in), otherwise letting out a grumbling growl, and, instead of the best-known streamlined Godzilla suit it's more like a craggy puppet: but director Ishirô Honda's GOJIRA is really a post-war fable more about the characters than the creature attacking them...

Including a subtle romantic-triangle with a young couple connected to an eye-patched pacifist/scientist, providing the ultimate answer to destroy Godzilla in an underwater sequence that's slow-moving, overlong and predictable but not without a capably suspenseful and ultimately groundbreaking outcome.