The Oxygen Destroyer

I imagine most people, when challenged to describe Godzilla, would come up with a guy in a big phony-looking rubber suit batting at a rubber giant moth swinging around his head on fishing line. I probably would too. That or the Smog-monster, for my money the best Godzilla foe.

That's why I was pretty surprised when I watched the original 1954 cut of the Japanese film Godzilla, and discovered that it's actually a very serious and disturbing movie. As part of the re-release, Cinema 21 played Godzilla all last week. The true cut has 40-minutes more of Japanese footage and lacks the 20 minutes of American padding. No Raymond Burr. No Americans. Lots of post-war Japanese pain and cynicism toward humanity.

The Japanese version is ALL ABOUT THE BOMB. Not metaphorically. The movie was inspired by the radiation poisoning of the crew of a Japanese ship that passed too close to U.S. Bikini Atoll H-Bomb testing. The blunt message of the movie pretty much boils down to: atomic testing was so much more than the key to ending WWII, and as a result the Japanese psyche is essentially ruined. A couple of examples:

-A young woman talks on a train about how she won't fall victim to fear of Godzilla. "I survived Nagasaki; I treasure my life." Later she's on a boat party (the only joyous event in the movie) laughing and drinking with friends when Godzilla rears up from the water nearby.

-Godzilla doesn't really breathe fire, but heat or radiation that looks like a deadly steam, melting steel and incinerating buildings on contact. It's a barely disguised dramatization of an atomic attack.

-Following a Godzilla rampage, a minutes-long hospital scene shows medics treating burned women and children, sprawled across the room and bawling.

-A mother and child hold each other in the face of death by Godzilla. "Don't worry, just a little longer and we'll be with your father again."

Right down to Godzilla's final confrontation, the enemy isn't guns and planes, or another monster, but a furthering of the arms race -- "The Oxygen Destroyer." The tiny weapon annihilates the elements in water, breaking down the oxygen and liquefying anything in the way. Its eye-patched creator discovered it trying to help humanity, and reluctantly unleashes it on the world, upping the ante in the escalation of weapons of mass destruction. And that's your happy ending. No wonder they put Perry Mason in before showing it to mid-century America.