Review of Godzilla 1985 (1985) by Kanaan P — 07 May 2010

I'm surprised to read Godzilla 1985 flopped at the box, I recall liking it a lot. First, I don't know what Ebert and Vincent Canby are talking about. It'd make no sense to update the look of Godzilla with 1985 special efx technology. (That was the mistake in the Sony 1994 grotesque, one of the great cinematic crimes in history.) Godzilla is supposed to look like a rubber bathtub toy. The hilarious thing about Godzilla is that he doesn't have any reason for destroying Tokyo. He's not like King Kong, who actually has a motive for destroying New York. Godzilla acts like a two-year-old knocking down his Leggo set -- a tragic yet profound metaphor for man's fate.

What I liked about 1985 was the Cold War supblot, initiated by Godzilla's attack on a Soviet submarine. 1985 acknowledges that there is a world outside Japan, and that the two superpowers might just be a tad worried about a force of nature that just obliterated the world's largest city. I also thought it was funny when Godzilla eats nuclear power, he looks like he's stoned, like he just fired up a plutonium blunt.

Best of all, I like the clever way Godzilla gets his this time around. 1985 sports an imaginative twist of the Serizawa Convention (that's what I call the stock monster movie device of the scientist who discovers the monster's only weakness, not a second too soon). For Darwinian evolutionary reasons, Godzilla thinks he's a duck. So when a flock of birds fly by, his avian DNA kicks in and he falls into formation and involuntarily follows after them. Professor Hayashida uses Godzilla's duck DNA to lure him into an erupting volcano. Cool.

Wiki trivia: Akihiko Hirata, who played Serizawa in the original Godzilla, was cast to play Hayashida in 1985, but died of throat cancer.