Rodan (1956)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

72 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Rodan is not my favorite of the innumerable Toho kaiju, just because there's nothing really spectacular about his design, but I do appreciate him anyway, especially after this. This film, containing his origin story, goes well beyond what can be boxed into the simple and easy definition of a monster movie, as is typical for Ishirō Honda. Just looking at the taglines from its international releases make it obvious how hard other audiences are missing the point. "The Super-Sonic Hell-Creature No Weapon Could Destroy!" Okay then.

1956's Rodan has a sinister tone to it that feels more akin to a horror film than even the original Godzilla did two years before it. For some reason I kept thinking about the original The Thing From Another World; I don't know why, there's not too many similarities other than characters threatened by a mystery creature, and Rodan isn't even a mystery for long. But for some time, though, the threat isn't clear and it is a mystery: it's just a series of people getting maimed by some unknown force down in a mine, and for audiences in the 50s, this must have been terrifying. The addition of giant grubs instantly takes away some of the menace to my American sensibilities because I've been conditioned to associate monsters = less seriousness, but things were different in the context of the time this film was released, and monsters didn't necessarily change the way people looked at a film. (Or at least some people, anyway.) Before the grubs come in, though, it's genuinely really eerie to see people come up against something they have absolutely no idea about. Men just keep going down into the mine and being taken and sometimes killed by... something. The ones that come back are struck mute by the horror of what they've seen. Nobody knows if it will stop or if it can be stopped, or what it means for the rest of the world.

The first person to actually see Rodan has such a look of terror on his face that it rivals any reaction to any conventional ghost in modern horror cinema. Rodan is really just a giant dinosaur, but the reactions from everybody who encounters him are acted out with such seriousness that I automatically gave Rodan more gravity than I had before. It might be ridiculous to imagine a real dinosaur flying around our world, but in the imagined scenario that this film takes place in, it's not ridiculous at all to see the destruction and strife visited upon the people affected by Rodan's arrival.

You usually feel some degree of sympathy for the kaiju in Ishirō Honda's films, but Rodan feels like a special case even for Honda. There is nothing that makes him stand out aside from being larger than usual. He has no powers that are separate from his large size; he can't shoot fire or atomic breath in this first appearance, all he does is exist in a space that is unprepared and unfit for him. He doesn't even fight, actually. He doesn't intentionally harm anything or anyone at all. The force of his body displaces enough air that his presence in a city is akin to a devastating tornado, and there's nowhere for him to touch down that won't destroy buildings and people. Rodan is yet another being who never asked to be brought into existence and is now stuck living as a lumbering, too-big presence that humans revile and seek to destroy for their own safety and survival, though Rodan has done nothing wrong. There are two of them in this first film and it is implied that they're mates, which of course makes everything even more tragic because they're so bonded to each other but are doomed because of their intrusion into the human sphere.

From a technical standpoint, this movie is almost as impressive as the original Godzilla, and maybe even surpasses it at points because it's in color and the quality of the background paintings can be seen clearly without the characteristic muddiness of the black-and-white Godzilla. The miniature sets still hold up and rival anything produced today. Although it's a long time before we actually get to see Rodan, it never feels boring, and instead maintains tension by, as I said earlier, creating a deep sense of menace while we only get the human side of things, just watching people be throttled by unknown creatures and never seeing them. The end is overwhelmingly sad and- a rarity- depicts humans as being in the wrong; the aggressors against a creature who was never trying to do anything but live. As the rockets rain down on Rodan and it becomes clear that we're shooting ourselves in the foot too when the volcano begins to erupt, the audience is made to feel for Rodan as a fellow creature in a way that not every character in this movie did. The international releases do not get this. They only see the survival of humanity and society as necessary no matter what the price, paying little to no heed to what suffers and is lost as a consequence.