Kaiju Films in the 'Nuclear World' • reviewsphere

Name a more iconic duo than King Kong and Godzilla, battling it out while manned helicopters are crunched between their fingertips, bouncing off their heads like swatted flies. ‘Kaiju’, from the Japanese for ‘strange beast’, became a genre that has spanned many decades and inspired some of the largest and archetypal characters in film. Immense forces of nature and the supernatural descend in the form of prehistoric sea monsters, gigantic humanoid mechas and monstrous gorillas. They leave a lot in their wake to scare and thrill an audience, and there have been some beautifully executed features created in honour of the Tokusatsa (special effects based) super-predators.

The first Kaiju hit came in the form of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 Gojira, or the scaly leviathan known in the West as Godzilla. In a post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki frightened landscape, Japanese filmmakers clocked onto what was really messing with the heads of its people; forces of cataclysmic proportions that seemed indestructible by humans. The monster was awakened from its sleep by hydrogen bomb testing, surviving these tests and rising to seek its vengeance.

Brian Merchant from Vice’s Motherboard cited Gojira as an ‘unflinchingly bleak, deceptively powerful film about coping with and taking responsibility for incomprehensible, manmade tragedy…It’s arguably the best window into post-war attitudes towards nuclear power we’ve got—as seen from the perspective of its greatest victims’. The original designs for the creature saw its head resemble the shape of a mushroom cloud, perpetually flooding the cities it rampaged through with ferocious, unsympathetic strength.

The film drew heavy criticism for its exploitative qualities, though slowly translations of its purpose, to frankly expose the horrific effects of the H-bomb and designed to open the naïve eyes of the West, were accepted by critics and it is now a heralded piece of Japanese cinema.

Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 box-office hit Pacific Rim might have appeared to be a money grabbing monster flick; its opening voiceover throwing out clichéd deep, gravelly voiceovers telling us ‘we though that alien life would come from the stars’, and the lovely Idris Elba telling us ‘we are cancelling the apocalypse!’ What the film actually entailed was an intelligent piece of artistry from a director who really cared about the form and its history. Del Toro’s catalogue of films connect to his love of the fantastical and his child-like wonder of the unknown, including his authentic fairy tale contributions such as Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and this year’s The Shape of Water. Like Honda’s first Kaiju film, Pacific Rim takes a panorama of a war-inflicted earth caused by the appearance of tower-block sized beasts, though this time it is the shift of tectonic plates which has disturbed their peace. Del Toro’s nod to the man-made issue of global warming here sits as the causality of this awakening, administering a provocative environmental statement in place of nuclear warfare.

It’s almost too bad that the impendence of gigantic monsters will not deter the leaders of our countries to take enough preventative action against these man-made threats to our planet. Epic, haunting and effective, these films tackle vast impending dooms, but also the very human response of coming together to defend, and should not be brushed aside as manoeuvres of capitalising commercialism.