Godzilla
Director: Gareth Edwards
Writers: Max Borenstein (screenplay), Dave Callaham (story)
Cast: Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn
Legendary Pictures | Warner Bros.
Rated PG-13 | 123 Minutes
Release Date: May 16, 2013
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
– J. Robert Oppenheimer
In 1954, IshirÅ Honda transformed the trauma of war into art with Godzilla, a science fiction film about a gigantic radioactive beast that rises from the depths of Tokyo Bay. The primordial force of nature firebombs Tokyo with its atomic breath, leveling the city and killing thousands. Honda created a walking metaphor for the nuclear devastation of World War II – a fantastic, out of this world creation that could embody the fears of an entire nation.
Godzilla is the granddaddy of kaiju cinema, but it’s also a very poignant and mournful drama – a Japanese film made at a time when the country was still reeling from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as H-bomb testing in the Pacific. Since then, Godzilla has become an international icon of devastation, spawning nearly thirty sequels. The King of Monsters endures because he is the perfect conduit through which to exorcise the predominant fears of our time.
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