The next big thing

Sometimes I run into some fridge logic in my own life. For instance, I have the strong impression of having watched the following trailer in a theater, but for that to have happened it would have had to have been shown before The Lego Movie, which would have been an interesting choice, to say the least.

Anyway, the news that another Godzilla movie was coming down the pipe lit a fire under the vague desire I've had for a while to watch the original Godzilla/Gojira from 1954. Partly because the Godzilla franchise became so goofy over time, it was intriguing to me that the original movie was so deadly serious, and so relevant in the bizarre way that we've been getting more and more used to things being relevant.

I've spent plenty of time since college noticing how America's cultural anxieties play out in our media. In the aughts we watched Spider-Man, Batman, and the crew of the Battlestar Galactica deal with the ramifications of the War on Terror. Then, of course, there are the hordes of zombies manifesting our fears of societal collapse.

It's 2014. Are we ready to be afraid of Godzilla again? If this new movie catches on, I think we might be. People are getting tired of zombies (the degree to which I continue to be impressed with The Walking Dead notwithstanding), but our anxiety seems prepared to outlast the trend. Zombies and kaiju both play on the same fears that our civilization is inadequate to deal with a serious challenge... flimsy, even. Are those state-of-the-art tanks defending us, or plastic toys? Are our walls made of brick or cardboard? Push them and find out.

In 1954, 60 years ago and 9 years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was a dark movie about a radioactive monster destroying Tokyo. Some reviewers thought it was too soon (especially because, earlier that year, a Japanese fishing boat had been caught in the fallout from a botched American H-bomb test).

If Godzilla were just about anger at America, I doubt it would have caught on here. And if it were just about nuclear weapons, I doubt it would have the same staying power. But Godzilla was, more generally, a disaster movie, and Japan's is a culture well acquainted with disaster: earthquakes, famines, fires, centuries of civil war... typhoon and tsunami are Japanese loan-words.

The civilians in this first Godzilla are already a bit jaded.

I came to Godzilla curious and finished it impressed. Not all of it ages well, of course, but most of it made good on its mighty ambitions. (It won the Japan Movie Association award for Best Special Effects, and lost Best Picture to Seven Samurai, possibly just my favorite movie ever.) It's at its best with the monster shrouded in smoke and darkness, which doesn't feel like cheating so much as a good use of the medium.

I take it as a good sign that the new movie's trailer, at least, is choosing to imitate that.

Of course this new movie could still turn out as poorly as the one in 1998 did. I think it's about time for it to be done right, though. Who knows? Maybe we can be as sick of city-flattening monsters in 2020 as we were of vampires in 2010.