Rick Winston Presents: The Original Godzilla

This screening is followed by a talk back with Rick Winston.

A stark and somber reaction to the Atomic Age, Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla is a towering (and tower-smashing) achievement of a monster movie. Western H-Bomb testing in the Pacific has awoken and mutated an ancient sea creature, dubbed by island locals as Godzilla (a.k.a. Gojira– a Japanese portmanteau that roughly translates to “Gorilla-Whale”). Now grown to skyscraper size, Godzilla works his way up the Japanese coastline towards Tokyo, leaving a path of destruction in his wake—reminiscent of the fire-bombings and nuclear attacks that Japan experienced just a decade prior—while a group of scientists and the Japanese military both race to stop the creature’s catastrophic rampage. Spawning a seventy-plus-year legacy with dozens of sequels, spin-offs, knock-offs, and reboots, the original Godzilla stands alone in the immediacy of its emotional impact. Honda creates a parable resonant to a nation in retrospection and recovery, and a world in the midst of rapid technological advancement with disastrous ecological effects, threatening to leave countless civilian casualties in its wake.