directed by Eugène Lourié
USA
80 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Although it's more than good enough to stand on its own merits, this movie is often known for being at least part of the inspiration for Gojira. Visually, the unnamed titular beast (it's just kind of "a dinosaur", not too specific) does bear a very strong resemblance to Godzilla, especially in the head, though the body is much more Komodo Dragon-ish and certainly not bipedal. The story itself also shares similar themes, but I am forcing myself not to compare the two overmuch as I am too biased to do that fairly. I will try to talk about this on its own.
There's also a direct link to Gojira in that the creature here is awakened and perhaps mutated by atomic testing. The film opens at a research base in the Canadian arctic, and the stark black-and-white does nothing to remove the stomach-churning grandeur of the nuclear explosions. In fact, there is something interesting about seeing the clouds and debris in black-and-white, because it blends so well with the already monochrome landscape of the arctic that in some way the effect is to make it look like part of nature, instead of what it is, which is the opposite. Seeing mushroom clouds in vivid, angry reds and oranges the way they're usually depicted clearly demarcates them as something manmade, but setting them against a landscape where everything is so white as to blend the horizon into the skyline makes it so that the mushroom cloud could easily be the flume from a glacier calving or another natural event in the arctic.
The scientists are quite pleased with themselves after conducting a successful test, and much is made of humanity's evolving grasp of science. I can't say this film goes too deep with any kind of statement about hubris or taking responsibility for our actions, but I do love the underlying message here: We get too full of ourselves, too proud to be uncovering the last secrets of science, thinking we know everything that's out there, and now look what's coming up over that hill. The dinosaur is a physical representation of the unmapped areas of our knowledge and the fact that no matter how comfortable we get, we can't predict nature's course, especially once we start messing with things like nuclear energy. I think the terror here is supposed to come more from the possibility of an undiscovered, ancient lifeform that could wreak havoc on our civilization, as opposed to the possibility of a new superweapon we could invent that would wreak havoc on our civilization, but sometimes that's nice. Sometimes we do just want to see a dinosaur wreck things.
I knew, of course, that this was a fairly old film, but it still surprised me that it's so... quaint, for lack of a better term. I think a lot of what I expected out of it simply didn't exist yet at the time this had been released. Much of the genre conventions were indeed invented by this film and would go on to be developed further later. I wonder how many films at the time had done scenes of large crowds in a city running in mass panic as buildings around them were destroyed by some monster. But the thing I wasn't expecting was that 99% of the action is restricted to the last twenty minutes or so. The main character, a scientist who narrowly escapes a brush with the dinosaur at the beginning of the film, returns to the States and spends the majority of the film trying to convince people around him to believe what he saw. Very few do, and even those willing to go along with him are doing just that - going along with him; half for fun, half out of genuine scientific curiosity. Nobody really takes anything seriously except for our protagonist, who for his part is quite earnest, charming, and softspoken about his wacky dinosaur tales. Until the latter part of the film, nothing has much weight. The jolly older paleontologist who agrees to go diving for evidence to support the protag's wild claims remains lighthearted as he descends in a diving bell to his death. People go about their lives with no inkling of the giant thing advancing down towards them.
It's to be expected from something of this era, but there really is a dearth of women here. If I recall correctly there were three with any kind of speaking role: One was a secretary of some kind, another was a nun, and the most important role played by a woman was the paleontologist's assistant, who is the only person to put stock in the main character's story, and encourages him to look into it further. No women are in this film who are not in some way in service to a man (possibly excepting the nun, but, well... I'm not going to get into theology here). I know a lot of people would say that there's no point in complaining about something that's been and gone already, but I do think it is important to acknowledge the gender inequality in films like this and how it still pervades cinema today, lest we slip back into a situation where women are not onscreen unless they're doing something for a man.
I've somehow gotten this far without talking about the practical effects. Pioneering, ahead of its time, a masterpiece; this and much more has already been said but I could say it again and it would still be deserved. The dinosaur really looks almost more like taxidermy in some scenes than an artificial object. I swear that when it roared I could see its sides expanding from its breath. Another thing we're not going to go into here is how much our image of dinosaurs has progressed since this film, except to say that this is probably a fairly inaccurate dinosaur, but that doesn't even matter to me because although it might not look like a "good" dinosaur, it looks like a real creature. It doesn't just have an appearance. It has a personality. I looked at it and it felt like it had interiority and a will of its own the way I would watch lizards in the pet store when I was a kid. Its movements are incredibly well choreographed and animalistic, and the detail in its skin and face doesn't lack much if anything at all. This really is the movie that set the standard, the one that everybody would try to imitate.
There is a beautifully sharp print on archive.org and I would go so far as to be a little snobbish and say that if you can't find this in good quality, maybe don't watch it at all, since the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion practical effects are the highlight of the show and it would be doing them a disservice not to be able to see them perfectly clearly. You can kind of take or leave the story because to be honest it is a little bit dull, sort of a standard "oh no a monster is coming - but we can firebomb it and then we'll all be okay!" situation, but again, that thing hadn't been done to death the way it has now. I think this is an important film in the history of practical effects and is, generally, also just a fun watch anyway.
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