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A mighty monster stomps across the skyline, scaled and unstoppable, leaving destruction in his wake. Bridges, skyscrapers, electrical towers: Nothing can withstand his might. Every step produces a shock wave, every breath a firestorm. He swats away missiles and artillery shells like so many gnats. Civilians race before him through the streets, necks craned upward in terror. <\/p>\n
Godzilla was hardly the first movie monster, but he is undeniably the king. Across almost 40 feature films, the aquatic kaiju<\/em> has gone from inscrutable menace to heroic savior and back again. Even the casual movie viewer can picture the formula: rubber-suited men wrestling above miniature model cities while puny humans look on with horror and begrudging respect. These rampages have become quaint and kitschy, safe enough to be parodied by Austin Powers and Pee-wee Herman.<\/p>\n Yet for the Japanese audiences who saw Ishiro Honda\u2019s \u201cGojira\u201d in 1954, the sight of annihilated cityscapes would have been quite familiar. Just after midnight on March 10, 1945, a fleet of American B-29 bombers firebombed Tokyo, targeting the city\u2019s wood-built low-income neighborhoods with napalm. The firestorm rapidly spread, and over the following hours at least 100,000 people died, \u201cscorched and boiled and baked to death,\u201d in the words of the operation\u2019s mastermind, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force. Survivors recalled rolling banks of fire. Temperatures so high that metal melted and human bodies burst spontaneously into flame. By Aug. 15, this strategy had expanded to 67 cities and included the dropping of two atomic bombs. It\u2019s been estimated that 400,000 Japanese civilians were killed and that nearly nine million more were made homeless. <\/p>\n Honda\u2019s film directly calls up these events. His Godzilla is a prehistoric beast, a dinosaur awoken from a subterranean chasm by underwater hydrogen-bomb testing. The monster acts with the implacable, impregnable logic of a natural disaster. His destruction of a village on remote Odo Island resembles a typhoon or a tsunami. When he finally reaches Tokyo, humans can do nothing as he rages, torching streets and crushing train cars in his teeth. Shooting in stark black and white, Honda frames the monster against a horizon of fire, like the annihilated cityscapes of the very recent past. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n