Godzilla Still Relevant After 60 Years In Japan

Above, the Godzilla slide in Yokosuka, Japan. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

A new article, "Godzilla Still Relevant and Raging After 60 Years In Japan" has been posted at InterAksyon.com.

The article begins with:

TOKYO | While a digitalized Hollywood reboot stomps its way to box office success around the world, the original Godzilla — a man in a rubber suit — has hit screens in Japan again, as relevant as ever. 

The 1954 classic, which spawned more than two dozen follow-ups, has been cleaned up for a two-week run in Tokyo to mark the 60th anniversary of the monster from the deep. 

Despite the shaky sets and the all-too-obvious latex costumes, a new generation of movie-goers declared themselves impressed. 

“I was really surprised to see a Tokyo that isn’t the current, neat Tokyo, but was just some 10 years after war, trampled again,” said Kenichi Takagi, 44, who took along his 10-year-old son. 

Visuals and audio have been given a scrub to remove some of the speckles and pops that cinema-goers are now unused to experiencing, although there is no hiding the fact that the creature is really a heavily-sweating actor in a suit. 

But the movie’s enduring popularity six decades on is testament to the continuing resonance of its themes of human helplessness in the face of forces that cannot be controlled.

The article does bring up a problem (without intending to do so) with the new Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros. Godzilla that writer Steve Ryfle brought up (and that I also noticed). Namely, that according to the Japanese version, Godzilla is a victim of nuclear testing and is "a walking, radiation-breathing analogy for nuclear disaster." This part of the Godzilla character was swept aside in the new movie. Instead, it transferred this aspect to the M.U.T.O. creatures. In the movie, the H-bomb detonations in the South Pacific were efforts to kill Godzilla and "not tests." This rendered Godzilla to being an "allegory of what?"

This is an article that fans (and non-fans) should read.

To read the article, go here.