Rodan (1956)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

82 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I rewatched this last night and I had some more thoughts on it that I'm going to add to this updated review. Seeing it in pristine picture quality for the first time made me realize that this is not just a very good four-star movie but a full five-star movie.

Rodan is still not my favorite of the innumerable Toho kaiju, but I do appreciate him, 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!" is a laughable attempt at making it sound like militaristic action and a menacing, evil monster are what you can expect when the reality is far different. Also, there are two Rodans in this first film, and much like Godzilla, every movie after it that features Rodan has had to ignore the ending and either imply that one of the two survived or that the Rodan du jour is a different member of the species entirely.

There is much the same meaning behind this as there was 1954's Godzilla, but Rodan for some reason never became associated with the long-lasting spectre of humanity's obsession with nuclear power the way Godzilla did. It is fairly on-the-nose about it, too: Early on in the film one of the mine workers remarks to a supervisor that "they" say the Earth is getting warmer, and if it keeps up, sea levels will rise and there will be flooding (this is 1956 - yikes). The supervisor doesn't have much of a reaction besides kind of a distant "oh, sounds bad" but almost immediately the film kicks off its action by having everybody suddenly scramble in response to - surprise, surprise - flooding in one of the mines. The looming fear behind Rodan is that as we change the Earth with mining and nuclear weapons testing, things are going to be awoken that we can't put back to sleep. When the mine is flooded and the Meganulon larvae venture out to claim human victims, it is transformed from a space that we, filled with hubris, thought we had conquered and controlled, into something once again foreign and unknown. And there is a message about responsibility in this as well: It not only is saying that we're going to hurt ourselves by continuing to disrespect nature and giving rise to horrors, but we're going to claim innocent non-human victims in the process. I will talk about this in a minute, but I want to stress - and this film stresses it as well - that the two Rodans do absolutely nothing; they don't even really fight back. They're just large animals whose existence is inconvenient for humanity, and our reaction is not to attempt to preserve them or to acknowledge our hand in disrupting their natural life-cycle, but to fill them full of lead. We're afraid of them because we're afraid to confront what they say about us.

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. For some reason I kept thinking about the original The Thing From Another World; I don't know why, there's not many similarities other than people threatened by a mystery creature. For some time, Rodan is 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. It's genuinely eerie to see people come up against something they have absolutely no idea about. Men just keep going down into the mine and getting 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.

I actually want to talk more about this as a horror movie because it really struck me on my rewatch last night how purely scary it is. The scene where Kenji Sahara's character, stricken by amnesia after his encounter with Rodan in the mines and unable to communicate his terror of it, is reminded of his experience and flashes back to it - that all felt like a literal nightmare. I can't convey to you what watching that and understanding it feels like because everybody inherently experiences a film differently, and also there is a large camp of people who would never be able to see a guy going into a mine and watching a giant bird hatch from a giant egg as frightening. But it's just... that scene is so, so hallucinatory and terrifying. There's just this primal no no no no no! fear to it. Somebody at my book club (hi Candace) once said that there's no fear that's more real or more intense than when you're a child and you're absolutely certain, nightlights and locked doors be damned, that there's a monster in your room; it is real and it is right there in front of you. That's what Sahara's encounter with Rodan feels like. It feels like seeing the impossible and being totally unable to escape from the fact that everything you thought you knew about the world before is wrong.

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 humans have claimed for our own. He doesn't even fight, actually. He doesn't intentionally harm anything or anyone at all. The force of his wings displace 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 because of the scale of our human sprawl. 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 to preserve their own safety and survival, though Rodan has done nothing wrong.

From a technical standpoint, this movie is almost as impressive as the original Godzilla, and maybe even surpasses it, because this was Toho's first kaiju film shot 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 even while we only get the human side of things, just watching people be throttled by unknown creatures and never seeing them. The ending 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 living being. 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.

The last thing I'll say about this is another observation I had upon rewatching it. I don't mean to shame anybody for liking movies that aren't deep, that exist solely to entertain you for an hour or so. But those movies feel so ephemeral in comparison to something like Rodan. Watching the incredibly detailed miniature city being destroyed by someone in a big flying dinosaur suit, I just felt so aware that people were doing all this, were setting all of this up and scripting it and shooting it and eventually releasing it, 66 years ago, to tell me something, and that I, 66 years later and in a different country, was - hopefully, at least partially - apprehending it. The big franchise Marvel and DC films, the mega-blockbuster sequels (Top Gun, Jurassic Park) are so tied to our current time that they will be out of date and incomprehensible within a couple of years. But I deeply understand and feel spoken to by this movie that came out two years before my mother was born, and I'd venture a guess that no matter how much time passes from its original release, that will still be the case.