by John Petty

Created on: October 21, 2008   Last Updated: May 21, 2012

Clearly, the Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich version of "Godzilla" (1998) was a disaster on many, many levels. By no means was this a good movie. However, at least some of the fault has to be attributed to the perceptions that the filmmakers put in place by associating their giant iguana movie with one of cinema's most popular and successful franchises. The question before us is not whether this would have been a "better" movie had it borne another title, but whether or not it would have been more successful.

Toho Studio's Gojira (or Godzilla, as he was rechristened when he was exported for Western audiences), was born as the result of three separate incidents: the Allied bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the first hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll that was held on March 1, 1954, and the resulting contamination of the Japanese tuna fishing boat, Diago Fukuryu Maru that caused international outrage and resulted in the deaths of several crewmen.

Considering the world's fears about the unleashed power of nuclear weapons, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka envisioned a giant monster, transformed by radiation, that would emerge from the sea and devastate Tokyo. This monster, soon named Gojira - a conflation of the Japanese words meaning "gorilla" and "whale" - would be a potent allegory for the horror unleashed upon the world in 1945. Japan, as the only nation to suffer such destruction, was in a unique position to make this movie. Tanaka enlisted Ishiro Honda to direct the film, and Eiji Tsubarya to create the special effects. The result was a thoughtful and intriguing movie with a clear and dire message: Don't release forces that you cannot control. In "Gojira" (1954), the monster is only stopped by the heroic sacrifice of a brilliant scientist, who takes the secret of the weapon that destroys Godzilla, a weapon that he foresees falling into the wrong hands and being used for harmful purposes, to his grave, ending the threat of one monster without unleashing or creating an even greater menace. Of course, when the film was re-edited for Western audiences, much of the political content was removed, resulting in a typical matinee monster movie, albeit a very successful and popular one.

Unfortunately, when Devlin and Emmerich set out to film their own version of Godzilla, they ignored all these basics elements that have contributed so greatly to the King of the Monster's popularity over the years. In their inept hands, Godzilla was transformed from a potent

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