Godzilla

The starting point was not fiction but a news story. In March 1954 the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon 5 was caught in fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll. Godzilla was shot within months, and for Japanese audiences it functioned less as a monster movie than as an open wound. Effects director Eiji Tsuburaya wanted stop motion until he worked out it would take seven years. What replaced it was suitmation, a performer in a suit walking through miniature cities, and it became the standard for Japanese monster films. Haruo Nakajima wore the suit. It weighed around 100 kilograms and he could last about three minutes inside before losing consciousness from the heat. He lost nine kilos over the shoot. The roar was invented with the same resourcefulness. Akira Ifukube loosened the strings of a double bass, rubbed them with a leather glove, recorded it and slowed the playback. Toho made that the standard for every monster that followed. It sold 9.69 million tickets in Japan. The heavily re-edited American version from 1956 actually out-grossed the original. Who it is for: viewers who want the origin of the genre and postwar Japanese trauma in the same film. Who it is not for: anyone expecting action. This is long, slow and in mourning.