<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Forget 1998&amp;#039;s ridiculous Roland Emmerich reboot. Forget the Godzooky-marred Hanna Barbera cartoon. Forget even 1968&amp;#039;s ultimate creature feature Destroy All Monsters, great though it is. The real yardstick against which Gareth Edwards&amp;#039;s forthcoming Godzilla movie should be judged is the 60-year-old original. Even then, it&amp;#039;s worth noting that there are really two incarnations of Ishir\u00C5&#141; Honda&amp;#039;s 1954 film. For years, the better-known version was the Hollywood re-edit, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters! which added new scenes starring Raymond Burr to cater for American audiences. But today the unaltered Japanese version, Gojira, finds greater support.  Whichever version you favour, the star of the show is the oversized lizard unleashed by a nuclear explosion. The monster&amp;#039;s native name, Gojira, is a portmanteau of two Japanese words, gorira and kujira which, when combined, mean &amp;#039;gorilla whale.&amp;#039; That description freed the imagination of art director Akira Watanabe, who also threw in elements of alligator and various breeds of dinosaur, to create cinema&amp;#039;s ultimate monster. Meanwhile, the beast&amp;#039;s roots in nuclear war have given him a suitably hot weapon: his atomic breath, a destructive breath that comes in handy for destroying Japan&amp;#039;s cities. 60 years and 30 films later (28 in Japan, two in America), Godzilla is an essential part of cinema history. Most of the follow-ups chose to surround the title character with fellow kaiju (literally &amp;#039;strange creatures&amp;#039;) like Rodan, Mothra or King Ghidorah, but on his first outing Godzilla was strong and scary enough to go it alone.  The result is tabloid filmmaking par excellence, as a nation&amp;#039;s communal nightmare is reworked as punchy, lightly political entertainment. If Godzilla still conjures up images of a man in a rubber suit stomping his way through the city, it&amp;#039;s worth remembering that, in 1954, such destruction was a visceral echo of what Japan had gone through, especially the spectre of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Accordingly, Gojira is a serious picture. Amongst the havoc, Honda finds room to pause while politicians argue with the public about the right thing to do, an echo of a nationwide dialectic. Meanwhile, mysterious scientist Serizawa wrestles with the weighty issue of whether or not to unleash a life-threatening super-weapon. Only the fact he&amp;#039;s wearing an eye-patch reminds us that this is a pulp genre pic; otherwise, the themes have real resonance given that a generation of scientists had much the same dilemma. Elsewhere, newsreel-style footage of relatives crowding around, desperate for news of loved ones, are executed with sombre restraint. Who knows? Maybe some of the extras weren&amp;#039;t acting at all but recalling their recent experiences. Or how about the stark cutaway to a family cowering in terror from a Godzilla attack? &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll join your father in heaven,&amp;quot; the mother sadly tells her children. We never find out if they survived, adding to the chill factor. Even so, this isn&amp;#039;t a docudrama about post-war Japan but a movie about a giant monster, and the film&amp;#039;s roots lie in fantasy. There is talk of ritual sacrifices to appease the beast, while characters remark that &amp;quot;today&amp;#039;s world is still full of mysteries&amp;quot;. The inspiration for Toho Studio to make a monster movie came from Hollywood, especially 1953&amp;#039;s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Yet it&amp;#039;s remarkable how much of Godzilla has explicitly fed back into blockbuster filmmaking.  The impatient editing, using wipes to get from scene to scene, were popularised in Star Wars by George Lucas, a keen student of Japanese cinema. The use of a scientist&amp;#039;s slideshow to give visual weight to an otherwise boring scene of exposition would be copied wholesale in Jurassic Park. And it&amp;#039;d be remiss not to mention Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro&amp;#039;s homage to Toho monster movies; it&amp;#039;s no coincidence that his underwater beasts are named kaiju. And then, of course, there&amp;#039;s the carnage. Honda is the godfather of the fantasy disaster movie and, arguably, there is little that Michael Bay, Zack Snyder and indeed Roland Emmerich have added to the genre&amp;#039;s iconography beyond the quality of the filmmaking technology.  The most radical aspect to modern eyes is the absence of a true hero; one of the reasons Burr was drafted in to give Americans an identification figure. The most familiar face in Honda&amp;#039;s version is Takashi Shimura, a regular for Akira Kurosawa best known as the leader of the Seven Samurai, but he shares the limelight with Momoko K\u00C5&#141;chias his daughter and later, Akihiko Hirata as Serizawa. The latter, ultimately, becomes the most memorable figure simply because of his third-act choices. But the real star is never in doubt. Whether attacking a clock tower in anger after it chimes, chomping on a train carriage like he&amp;#039;s picking up a morsel from a buffet, or swatting away missiles with the disdain of the mildly inconvenienced, Godzilla is an absolute dude. Don&amp;#039;t say he&amp;#039;s a man in a suit like it&amp;#039;s a bad thing. The man in question (Haruo Nakajima, who played the role until the 1970s) gives the lizard so much of its character. Gareth Edwards has remained true to Gojira by spreading the human interest amongst a talented ensemble (including Bryan Cranston, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen and Juliette Binoche) \u00E2\u20AC\u201C but then so did Emmerich. And while the latest &amp;#039;gorilla whale&amp;#039; looks suitably awe-inspiring thanks to Edwards&amp;#039;s background in FX, the 1998 vintage was no slouch, either.  The only real question facing Godzilla in 2014 is whether the title character can bring back the personality that made the original such a hit. Here&amp;#039;s hoping that Godzilla still has that &amp;#039;man in a suit&amp;#039; factor.      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/re-viewed/feature/a569233/re-viewed-ishiro-hondas-original-1954-monster-classic-godzilla/>