Rodan

...pretty sure that's not true though.

Well, Rodan was… interesting. A mystery-horror show that was… surprisingly brutal, actually; then a disaster pic that really feels like it’s riffing on Gamera (except for the fact that Gamera hadn’t been invented yet), and a kind-of tragic ending.

My wife hated it; I will admit that the pacing for the bug-chase and some of the fight-scenes were a little… glacial. The aerial jet-fighter scenes were very ambitious, and a lot of fun, and the city destruction was tremendous (although, was Rodan blowing really hard? Since when does he have Superman-style super-breath?), and most of the high-speed stuff (such as the flipped jeep, which truly looked like a brutal car crash) was fantastically done. The ending bombing, by contrast, was an effects scene that went on FAR too long, and by the end, I was in stitches over how they kept using the same single explosion sound effect over and over for every explosion. It came off like a parody in which the sheer repetition becomes the joke.

The plot’s a little thin, so there’s not a lot to say on characters; there’s some nice gender-equality in that no, it’s not just the women that are called upon to scream and faint at the sight of a kaiju… people went into fugues and traumas and faints a lot more easily in the 50s, apparently. Like, I get that seeing a Rodan hatch would be kind of scary, but utterly destroying your mind? Well, like I said, at least they didn’t just single out the girls for that kind of treatment in this era, so that’s something. 

I found the geologist to be the most interesting character; the scientist trying to explain Rodan’s origins was no Dr. Yamane. And I had to laugh when the picture of the pteranodon they pulled out matched the body-position, pose, and even size of the photograph exactly. Ah, 50s filmmaking- don’t ever change.

The messages in this film were light; the anti A-bomb statement seemed almost perfunctory, tacked on… while 

the global warming conversation was just… there. Discussed jokingly and in such an offhand manner that it almost felt like it wasn’t supposed to be a message at all. Just out to raise awareness more than tell the audience what to think, I guess; it was just a strange way to start the movie.

In the end, I never cared much about the protagonists, had to wait half the film to get to Rodan, was irritated by the repetitive screeching of the Meganula… but I don’t hate the film. The spectacles are superb, the ending volcanic scenes are especially fantastic (this is perhaps the best miniature lava I’ve ever seen; far more realistic in its behavior than the more visually-creative efforts of even films like Temple of Doom and Revenge of the Sith; it had enough verisimilitude that if not for the signature focal depth of miniature photography, I would have assumed it was actual volcanic footage), and the death of the Rodans generates some serious pathos despite the clumsiness of the film to that point. Rodan isn’t a great film… but it’s not too bad. (My wife would disagree).

(Though I will say, in the last 3 months or so since I wrote this, I have come to think of it as one of the biggest snooze-fests of the Showa era, so… maybe I was being a little over-generous here? Considering the brevity of the review, and the slothful pacing of the first half, that would seem to be the case…)

 

'The movie wasn't THAT bad!"
"Go away...forever please."

One other note; the music is a very strange proto-version of many of the other Toho stock, as if this film was a musical test-bed. Rodan’s hatching has a clear Heisei-era Godzilla sting, while the ending music is so close to what would come to be associated with sad/pathos moments for Mothra that it’s uncanny; I feel as if Ifukube was refining his work for use in future films here. And while the music in a lot of other moments (particularly the opening credits) sounds sub-par to me, these little moments of eerie similarity give the soundtrack a very fun, scavenger-hunt feel for me.

All-told, Rodan was nothing to write home about; the kaiju parts are fairly solid, but the human interest story lacks... well, interest... and too many of the sequences drag. In many ways, it is the inverse of Godzilla Raids Again, but both are emblematic of the footing that Toho has yet to find for the kaiju films. Perhaps next week, however, they'll manage to strike that balance at last, and capture lightning in a bottle again, for the first time since the original Gojira...