Wilmington On DVDs: Godzilla

Even though he's a little late to the game, Mike Wilmington has a pretty decent review of the recently released Godzilla on Blu-Ray.

In it he talks about what influenced Director Ishiro Honda towards making this film, and how the American version is still a very good success in it's own right.

Here's a good example of what Mike has to say:

Kurosawa has said that the secret (or sometimes not so secret) subtext of all his movies is the paranoia of the nuclear age, and Honda could say the same thing — especially of Godzilla. The movie’s inspiration came from a real-life nuclear accident: the irradiation of a huge area around the American H-Bomb test site at Bikini Atoll, and the poisonings and deaths of Japanese fishermen on the trawler Lucky Dragon Number 5, which had strayed into the danger zone. Godzilla begins with a virtual recreation of that incident, with monster instead of radiation. And the clear implication is that we can take the monster attack as a metaphor for nuclear poisoning — even though the movie’s Godzilla has apparently been around for a while. Soon the humongous lizard-being is invading islands, attacking more sea craft, and edging closer and closer to his Grand March on Tokyo — a metropolis that he can, impressively, find without the aid of maps or compass.

As you can see it's pretty straight-forward while adding in his own mix of humor.

And like most movie critics he finds a way to tie this in with himself hehe.

If you're interested in checking out his review you'll find it here:

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