Godzilla, King of the Monsters! |
USA / Japan • 1956 • 80m •
  • Directed by: Ishirô Honda, Terry O. Morse. • Starring: Raymond Burr, Takashi Shimura, Momoko Kôchi, Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata, Sachio Sakai, Fuyuki Murakami, Ren Yamamoto, Toyoaki Suzuki, Tadashi Okabe, Toranosuke Ogawa, Frank Iwanaga, Mikel Conrad. • Music by: Akira Ifukube.      The first of the Godzilla movies, and the most somber and serious in tone, Godzilla, King of the Monsters was originally a 98-minute Japanese horror film, until a U.S. company bought the rights and reissued the film at its current 79 minutes, replacing sequences involving a Japanese reporter with new inserts of a dour, pipe-smoking Raymond Burr. True to the fashion of cautionary monster movies, Godzilla has arisen due to nuclear radiation--a 400-foot, fire-breathing dinosaur resurrected in Tokyo Bay--and proceeds to devastate Tokyo. Hardly a bogus building is left unbusted, nary a toy tank unmelted, by the reptilian rogue, until scientists discover another weapon of awesome destruction that just might stop him. The special effects are impressive, with the filming done so as to mask the fact that the monster is just a guy in a rubber suit, working better here than in the sequels, where they seem to have given up any pretense to that fact, in favor of flamboyant effects and battle sequences that more often than not are delightfully, unabashedly juvenile.
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Review:
The way that this hybrid version works is rather neat. Instead of releasing a subtitled version of the original film or dubbing it into English in its entirety, the original film is reimagined and reedited to an extent. The focus on the film ends up being a Western journalist named Steve Martin (played by Raymond Burr who is perhaps best known for his role as attorney Perry Mason) who ends up in Japan during a flight and stays to cover the unfolding events. Along the way he ends up present in many of the original film's sequences and interacts with its lead characters. It's an interesting way to do things to be sure.
To accomplish this, the original film is restructured. It ends up largely being told in flashback, opening with Tokyo in ruins with Burr's Martin among the rubble. Taken to hospital, Martin takes the viewer back through the events of the previous few days. King Of Monsters takes a conventional linear narrative and does something rather more interesting with by reworking how it unfolds. Seeing the film for the first time right around a decade ago, it's a move that built tension into the plot by leaving the viewer wondering what had happened. Seeing this version now and practically back to back with the original, I still find it an admirable idea and quite a successful one.
There's also the business of putting a character into scenes he was never in to begin with. For the most part that's done successfully by having Martin off on the sidelines where he can see events but only rarely interact with them. It's easy to watch the film and see where it would have been possible for Martin to have featured in the film quite plausibly. Indeed there's times when the film feels a bit like Trials and Tribble-ations, the 1997 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode which had characters from that series interacting with the Original Series Enterprise crew on the sidelines of one of its episodes. Burr himself does a good job in terms of his performance to make everything work and he's got some effective moments such as his reporting of the rampage of Godzilla through Tokyo. On the while, the filmmakers efforts are often successful.
It isn't always successful though. Despite laudable efforts to get cinematography and other elements to match, they never quite do. There's an obvious difference in the old footage and the new footage just in the way it looks which I suspect is probably down to film stock. Also the decision to dub some of the Japanese dialogue but not other moments comes across feeling very weird as there's times when characters swap back and forth between Japanese and English without any good reason to (except for audience understanding when Martin isn't around). Plus, as well as the efforts to insert Burr into the film are, there's times when it becomes blatantly obvious that he wasn't there and he's talking to doubles in an effort to advance his involvement with the plot with prime examples being his conversation with Dr. Yamane to join the group heading to Oko Island or talking with Emiko and Ogata in the hospital.
Something else gets lost in the process as well. There's a thoughtful edge to the original Japanese version which helps it to raise above many other monster films. By restructuring the film, reediting parts of it, and cutting a sizable chunk out of it it loses some of that thoughtful edge. A lot of talk about nuclear weapons and how they've had an effect on Godzilla gets lost and the dilemma faced by Dr. Serizawa loses a significant amount of its impact by being effectively reduced to melodrama. That thoughtfulness is still there in bits and pieces but it's full impact isn't present and it ends up being lost almost entirely in places.
In turning Godzilla into Godzilla: King Of The Monsters!, perhaps more is lost than is gained. It loses some of its thoughtful edge while the quality of the overall product is hampered somewhat by some of the dubbing and efforts to shoehorn a Western character into a Japanese film. Yet the efforts to fit that character in works more often than not with Burr making an admirable effort in his new main role. Is it better than the original film? No it isn't. Is it worth seeing, either on its own or as a curiosity? Most definitely. If not else, it stands as one of the great examples of how to take one film and make it into something a bit different through the magic of filmmaking.
Review by Matthew Kresal from the Internet Movie Database.
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