For a list of Horror/Thrillers, Kaiju films present an interesting challenge. Most of them are Fantasy Action, but there are a handful where the emphasis is not on monsters wrestling but an unstoppable force annihilating mankind. Godzilla Minus One is in the 300s and the 2014 film is around 700, but the 1954 original comes first because it is so far removed from my idea of a Godzilla movie. It’s like if Paul Greengrass made a Godzilla film where the monster destroys New York City, creating an epic 9/11 that people could never hope to recover from? I’d always heard about Godzilla starting out as a metaphor for the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, but I couldn’t imagine how that works with my modern idea of a Godzilla film. Now I see that it makes perfect sense.
Remove most of the camp – there’s still the one-eyed scientist with the oxygen-removing bomb – add in somber choir music and film in stark black and white and Godzilla becomes a walking holocaust. Mass destruction on such an unimaginable scale, the people wonder if they brought it on themselves. There’s also the legendary Takashi Shimura as the most convincing scientist ever to question why we’re so bent on destroying the monster and not trying to understand it. (That character type has never been more sympathetic.) As for the one-eyed scientist, even he becomes a philosophical question of fighting all-out destruction with a weapon even more powerful.
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