GODZILLAHEIMER

Might as well go out of this year of 2023 with a bang and what better way than to talk about Japan's most legendary prehistoric reptile - Godzilla.

My own idea for a Godzilla re-boot, given the current repeating zeitgeist around nuclear war, would have been to have had the iconic monster birthed out of the devastation of Hiroshima, linking the mutant creature to its creator father, J. Robert Oppenheimer in similar fashion to how David Lynch imagined the conception of the satanic Killer Bob as a direct result of the first Atom bomb 'trinity test' in Los Alamos (July, 1945) in Twin Peaks, Season 3 (2017).

A double feature of 'Oppenheimer' (2023) followed by 'Godzillaheimer' (TBC) would certainly make for one epic, if exhausting double bill. Actually, given how much I've disparaged Christopher Nolan as a director this year, I think we can drop his flabby epic from consideration in this hypothetical instance.

Watching the far more enjoyable and well crafted 'Godzilla Minus One' (2023) yesterday, I was reminded of what a symbolic creature Godzilla is in representing the essence of the Japanese psyche in the 20th century and beyond with all the collective societal paranoia of earthquakes and atomic/nuclear devastation from 'little boy' to Fukushima. This innate, existential angst which hangs over the country like a samurai sword of Damocles has been the inspiration for many great books and films, including Shindô's 'Children Of Hiroshima' (1952), Alan Resnais's 'Hiroshima Mon Amor' (1959) and several of Haruki Murakami's novels and collections of short stories including 'The Wind Up Bird Chronicle' and 'After The Quake'. In 'Godzilla Minus One' it is not Oppenheimer's 'destroyer of worlds' that forms Godzilla's mutation but the nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, a tiny ring of islands where many nuclear bombs were detonated between 1946 to 1958. This merging of the prehistoric past with the nuclear future is a perfect metaphor for a world now split like the atom into two separate paradigms - the pre-nuclear to the post nuclear.

I've always imagined it to be the case that the perilous and volatile geography of Japan where its continental and oceanic plates cross over combined with its history of atomic/nuclear incidents forces a certain realism about the ever present spectre of death for its people and the culture at large. Godzilla, ridiculous though it may sound to some, embodies all of this in one giant, mutated form and watching 'Godzilla Minus One' really brought home how a mythology around something fantastical is born into art. If King Kong represented a portent of the excesses of capitalism post gilded age then Godzilla represents the insecurity of a country that is forever on edge in anticipation of disaster, natural or man made.

Another feature of the movie that was hugely impressive was how it contrasted the value of the smallest and most vulnerable of lives against the biggest and seemingly most indestructible of monsters which could also be a metaphor for director Takashi Yamazaki storming the US box office to number one spot with his comparatively low budget blockbuster.

Further themes of love, guilt, honour and PTSD all add to something far more than just a schlocky monster movie and reminded me that sometimes it's the most simple of tales that hit most cleanly the target of our hearts as an audience.

In the case of 'Godzilla Minus One' Ryunosuke Kaki as Kōichi Shikishima proves to be the perfect hero for our time as he demonstrates that the greatest act in this age of rampant narcissism is that of self-sacrifice.