{"id":11014,"date":"2014-05-12T07:16:08","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T13:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=11014"},"modified":"2014-05-12T07:16:08","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T13:16:08","slug":"for-the-fear-of-godzilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=11014","title":{"rendered":"For The Fear Of Godzilla"},"content":{"rendered":"
He\u2019s a 350-foot-tall metaphor.<\/p>\n
The King of Monsters returns Friday in Warner Bros.\u2019 \u201cGodzilla,\u201d and though he has been dormant from the big screen for a long time, one thing hasn\u2019t changed in the 60 years since he first stomped onto the shores of Tokyo: He represents our fears of a modern world.<\/p>\n
Back in Toho Studios\u2019 1954 movie \u201cGojira\u201d (a combination of the Japanese words for gorilla and whale \u2014 sort of like Sharknado), the rampaging radioactive mutation may have been an actor in a rubber costume, but he captivated worldwide audiences still terrified by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their atomic and environmental fallout.<\/p>\n
Of course, the world has walked away from the brink of atomic warfare, but Gareth Edwards, director of the new \u201cGodzilla,\u201d didn\u2019t have to look hard to find psychological fears to explore in his bigger, badder CGI behemoth.<\/p>\n
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<\/i><\/b>Godzilla will always represent that fear that there is something beyond our control.<\/i><\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt was just a case of trying to find what the relevance is today,\u201d Edwards told The News. \u201cAnd \u2018Godzilla\u2019 has always been about nuclear power and radiation.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs we were writing the film, the horrible events in Fukushima (a tsunami-caused nuclear meltdown) happened and we had to make the decision: Do we stay away from that or do we acknowledge that you\u2019ve opened this Pandora\u2019s box of nuclear power, and when it goes wrong, it really does go wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cGodzilla,\u201d the monster is awakened from the deep by a malignant creature discovered when it attacks a nuclear plant in Japan. Though the humans are largely irrelevant to the story, a heroic engineer (Bryan Cranston) and his son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) join forces with a secretive Japanese scientist (Ken Watanabe) to stop the towering threats as they head across the Pacific to the U.S.<\/p>\n
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The swath of destruction they leave in their wake is evocative of news footage from the Sept. 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the 2011 tsunami \u2014 but don\u2019t call it coincidence. Call it relevance. Freaking out filmgoers is just a matter of opening up the paper and putting it in your script.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately for our generation, you don\u2019t have to imagine very hard,\u201d says Edwards. \u201cFor the last 10 years, there have been these horrific situations and the visuals from those moments have just scarred everyone\u2019s minds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as \u201cGodzilla\u201d did for Japanese audiences back on Nov. 3, 1954, when the film opened in a nation still very much in the throes of nuclear anxiety.<\/p>\n
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