Latest / CinemaHounds - A Lorehounds Podcast / Godzilla Minus Zero (2026) - Part 2 of 3 - Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Transcript

Godzilla Minus Zero (2026) - Part 2 of 3 - Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla Minus One (2023) · CinemaHounds - A Lorehounds Podcast

0:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to the Laura Hounds and our pre-release coverage for Godzilla minus zero.
0:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm your host David and with me today for this part two podcast part two of three is newly minted Laura's community co host neat neat.
0:33
[SPEAKER_03]: How you doing today?
0:34
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm doing great coming here great we had a good conversation with part one I thought with the history in the context of Godzilla we did a very typical Laura Hounds thing
0:46
[SPEAKER_03]: which is we went far too long for what we had decided we were going to do.
0:50
[SPEAKER_03]: It's okay.
0:51
[SPEAKER_03]: You can let them know that that's my fault.
0:53
[SPEAKER_03]: No, but you don't understand that that's that is classic Lorhound behavior that is like well you you experience it.
1:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh yeah, you know, it's like, oh one podcast turned into three.
1:05
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, so this is too turning into three.
1:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's all well within bounds.
1:10
[SPEAKER_03]: But anyway, we're going to be talking today about the 1954 Godzilla movie with some notes about the 56 version and then Godzilla minus one and then once Godzilla minus zero is out probably about a week later will be back with a movie review of that and we'll sort of wrap up the whole series altogether.
1:30
[SPEAKER_03]: For those of you who participate on our community discord as working with the moderator Brian 863 today, we're setting up a whole new sort of forum channel for all of the sort of godzilla e-stuff we're going to call it monster island.
1:45
[SPEAKER_03]: and we'll have a channel for Toho, we'll have a channel for legendary, and then movie threads, we'll have their own threads, and I think like when the TV series comes back, you know, depending on what kind of coverage and we have on that, they'll be, you know, a space to have a conversation there.
2:03
[SPEAKER_03]: So look forward to that coming along and then my blog post on the semiotics of how to read a monster's body is up and available, link in the show notes, kind of had some fun with that, learn some things and there's I really discovered there's a wide, wide world of people who compare the gods in the monodies and rank them as much in a YouTube.
2:27
[SPEAKER_03]: day where I was doing a whole sort of est here ranking of like a lot of the different.
2:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't realize each design has its own name as well and like it goes deep.
2:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't realize it's fascinating stuff.
2:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
2:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
2:43
[SPEAKER_03]: People have a lot of fun.
2:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, we'll keep the house keeping short today.
2:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Remember, if subscription is an option for you, when you think you want to give us a hand, we really appreciate it.
2:57
[SPEAKER_03]: We get by on add dollars, but subscriptions are really a much more direct way to support the community and support getting more podcasts like these made.
3:06
[SPEAKER_03]: You can get in touch with us at our
3:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I mentioned, the Discord, and of course we are a network, and so we have got a bunch of affiliate podcasts, and in the show notes, if you look down at the bottom, there's a link tree, it's kind of a webpage that aggregates all of our links, and it's a lot easier for us to maintain and update, and that has links to all of the different affiliates, and subscription channels,
3:32
[SPEAKER_03]: The blog goes directly to the blog, all kinds of things, so check out that link if you want to follow up on anything with the affiliates or get in touch with us in any other way.
3:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So like I mentioned, we'll talk about 1954, we'll take a little break then we'll do some conversation about minus one and then we'll do a little bit around minus zero.
3:51
[SPEAKER_03]: So, Nate, let's start talking about 54, and you've got some notes here in the outline.
4:00
[SPEAKER_03]: You want to sort of set the stage for us for 54?
4:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
4:05
[SPEAKER_02]: So, before I guess, we're calling it 54, obviously, because it was released in 1950.
4:12
[SPEAKER_02]: It's kind of the easiest way, right?
4:16
[SPEAKER_02]: You can't say the Godzilla movie when there's 38 of them.
4:21
[SPEAKER_02]: So just so that people know we're using that as kind of the shorthand to talk about the original OG, you know, does it have it's quite literally OG original OG, right?
4:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's very good.
4:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Does it have its kind of own Goji, I mean, I know I sometimes see it written Goji, Gojira, I don't know if I pronounce it.
4:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Gojira is, so that's the Japanese version of it, and then when it's anglicized, it's good, so low, but yeah.
4:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Right exactly.
4:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So sometimes I've seen people refer to the 54 movie in that spelling.
4:49
[SPEAKER_03]: But I didn't see that.
4:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
4:50
[SPEAKER_02]: This show or if that's just sort of a different story.
4:54
[SPEAKER_02]: People are making sort of.
4:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
4:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
4:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, you said 38 films.
4:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So like how do you you need to know
5:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I'm actually going to jump to the historical context first, just to kind of get that out of the way.
5:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Perfect love it, but so, you know, the movie is released nine years after the end of World War II, and it's tears after the US occupation of Japan.
5:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So the memories of Japanese people are still fresh with.
5:22
[SPEAKER_02]: both the destruction from the U.S. bombing raids on Tokyo and, of course, other major cities and, you know, finally, Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the atomic bombings.
5:33
[SPEAKER_02]: They've also just been through the experience of U.S. occupation by military forces.
5:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
5:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And,
5:41
[SPEAKER_02]: including the running of the Japanese government by the U.S. occupation administration.
5:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And so during this time, Japan really lacked its own kind of autonomy.
5:56
[SPEAKER_02]: The U.S. basically wrote the new constitution for the Japanese that went into effect in 1947.
6:04
[SPEAKER_02]: in that constitution, article nine banned warmaking capability, so that's a very controversial to this day, part of that constitution, because what does that mean, what does it mean that they can have military forces or not, we'll get into that a little bit.
6:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Can I have a quick question about Article 9?
6:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Is it still standing or has it is?
6:24
[SPEAKER_02]: OK.
6:25
[SPEAKER_02]: It is.
6:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Rather than change it to this point anyway, though, of course, some elements of the Japanese political spectrum have wanted to.
6:38
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really
6:40
[SPEAKER_02]: just been continually reinterpreted, and this actually brings up a good example of that.
6:45
[SPEAKER_02]: The Japanese self-defense force was organized in July of 1954, and of course, it's the self-defense force.
6:53
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not an army, quote unquote, even though it has army equipment and has, you know, military equipment that you would expect.
7:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So article nine,
7:04
[SPEAKER_02]: hasn't changed.
7:05
[SPEAKER_02]: It's actually still part of the Japanese Constitution.
7:07
[SPEAKER_02]: It hasn't been officially amended, you know, you know, some would like to do so, but instead it's just been reinterpreted.
7:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, what does warmaking capability mean?
7:23
[SPEAKER_02]: That's why Japan officially their military forces are called the self-defense force and not the army.
7:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, it turns like that tend to be a little bit politically charged, especially when we're talking about what they're allowed to do and what they're not allowed to do.
7:38
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not going to go down that road.
7:42
[SPEAKER_03]: That's one of your lessons.
7:44
[SPEAKER_03]: That would take me into a lecture.
7:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
7:48
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't really talk about a movie and a topic.
7:50
[SPEAKER_02]: But it is within the context of the movie, it is interesting to note that the self-defense force itself was organized in July of 1954.
7:58
[SPEAKER_02]: In response to US pressure, because even though the US wrote the constitution that said, hey, you can't have a military, once the Korean war happened, right next to Japan, and all those US soldiers that were in Japan, the US wanted to move them to fight the war in Korea,
8:17
[SPEAKER_02]: The idea was, well, okay, we have to get a loud Japan to have some military forces, even if they call it a self-defense force.
8:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And so in the movie, when you see military equipment, it's American military equipment that's being used by this new self-defense force.
8:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So in some ways, and we'll see this in other Godzilla movies as we go, it's a kind of an advertisement in some ways for the self-defense force to say,
8:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I could see, too, that would be a really interesting area of steady because what is warmaking capability mean, it's not, oh, you've got a tank.
8:58
[SPEAKER_03]: It's that you have a factory that can produce a thousand tanks a week or something.
9:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Indeed, indeed, indeed.
9:04
[SPEAKER_02]: That's certainly one take on it, you know, of course the
9:10
[SPEAKER_02]: other political take is well anything that like you can't have a rifle or something no pews oh my gosh that would be a military capability and of course does anybody actually interpret it that way you you know policy no of course not but interesting anyway but I'm sure it's a fascinating area of city
9:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So, at this time, I guess the point of what I was getting to with me with all of this is that even though, you know, we're all aware of Japan's activities during the World War period in China and Korea and other places around Asia, Philippines,
9:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Japan because of the way that the war ends with utter destruction of most of its cities, its infrastructure, a lot of civilian casualties, and
10:10
[SPEAKER_02]: we can't not mention the two atomic bombings Japan being the only country who has ever been targeted in war with nuclear weapons.
10:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Then Japan sees itself a bit as a victim because even though obviously it was the aggressor in the war, the average Japanese person is able to at the end of the war say, well, it wasn't me, it was the,
10:36
[SPEAKER_02]: militarists, it was the politicians, it was all those people who led us into war and I was just along for their ride.
10:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So once those people removed from power, Japan as a whole kind of has this
10:56
[SPEAKER_02]: and through the occupation and then even into, you know, the Cold War, in some ways they're trapped between two nuclear powers, the United States, who they have a complicated relationship because they were just defeated by the United States in war and then occupied.
11:13
[SPEAKER_02]: But also, they are treaty allies.
11:15
[SPEAKER_02]: They are pulled into the United States as kind of sphere of influence, almost by default, because their military capability is now limited due to the constitution.
11:27
[SPEAKER_02]: They have to rely on the United States for their security and protection.
11:32
[SPEAKER_02]: But they're also, their close, Japan's closest neighbor, a lot of people don't know this.
11:36
[SPEAKER_02]: is Russia.
11:37
[SPEAKER_02]: It is the Soviet Union.
11:38
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a couple islands in the northern side that are only separated from one of the main islands of Japan by, you mean they can say Russia?
11:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you can actually see Russia from the backyards in certain parts of Northern Japan.
11:53
[SPEAKER_02]: No, that's 100% true.
11:55
[SPEAKER_02]: On a clear day, you can.
11:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, those islands are disputed, so
12:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So, the point is that Japan, you know, through this time, it's feels very powerless.
12:13
[SPEAKER_02]: It feels that it's kind of caught between these nuclear powers.
12:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It's kind of caught between these two kaiju.
12:19
[SPEAKER_03]: These two giants, yes, nuclear monsters, nuclear monsters, nuclear monsters.
12:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And so,
12:27
[SPEAKER_02]: As all this is kind of rolling about, right?
12:31
[SPEAKER_02]: On March 1st, 1954, there's an incident where a Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon Number Five, or Daigo, Fukuru-Yu-Maru, in Japanese.
12:43
[SPEAKER_02]: With a crew of 23 is caught in the radiation fallout from a US H-Bon test in the Pacific.
12:52
[SPEAKER_02]: outside of what had been designated the, you know, safe zone or the, the area around the blast that you needed to keep out of.
13:02
[SPEAKER_02]: They were outside of that, but because of, you know, shifting winds and all sorts of things, they still were exposed to severe radiation.
13:12
[SPEAKER_02]: all of them get radiation sickness, one of them dies a few months later.
13:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And this incident stokes anti-US and anti-nuclear sentiments, especially because the US was very cryptic and unwilling to release information.
13:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I think on the US side, there was speculation that this fishing boat was actually not Japanese, but that it was doing spy activity for the Soviets or something like that.
13:37
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a little bit of a cold war, right?
13:39
[SPEAKER_02]: So we got all this stuff going on.
13:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, and, and lack of information often times breeds that kind of, uh, speculation, that, that sort of, uh, wild speculation about things going on.
13:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
13:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess we could say that the op-sac was a little bit convoluted during, in, indeed, indeed.
13:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So, actually, I should start making all of these concurrent jokes.
14:02
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll move on.
14:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Moving on.
14:04
[SPEAKER_03]: That's okay.
14:06
[SPEAKER_02]: So, yeah, so this is kind of like the stage setting events for the movie, and then when I should all honda, who is the writer and main writer and the director of the movie, was coming up with a concept.
14:23
[SPEAKER_02]: He
14:26
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess there was another movie that you've been working on that kind of fell through and so you had an opening and time to do it.
14:32
[SPEAKER_02]: So we said, well, why don't I make a movie on these themes of a nuclear?
14:42
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, issues and in, and so on.
14:44
[SPEAKER_02]: The rule fell out.
14:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to do it as a metaphor.
14:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And he had also been influenced by the movie Godzilla, I'm sorry, not the movie Godzilla.
14:55
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the movie Godzilla.
14:56
[SPEAKER_02]: The movie King Kong had just been re-released for the 1930s for the, okay.
15:00
[SPEAKER_02]: and probably in shipped over to Japan, and indeed was being shown in Japanese theaters, and also there were some other American monster movies.
15:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Great, because this is also the rise of the right.
15:13
[SPEAKER_03]: When I was doing my research on this little bit, I was wondering if Godzilla was one of the early
15:18
[SPEAKER_03]: IP franchises, sort of these IP salt mines that we have, and in fact, the Frankenstein wolfman vampire, Dracula stuff, that was sort of the first one.
15:31
[SPEAKER_03]: But interesting and maybe discussed later is that the Toho turned out to be the first sort of roster one of the size and this volume.
15:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So they were a very early leader in IP franchise management.
15:44
[SPEAKER_03]: but preceding it was King Kong and then Dracula, Wolfman, Frankenstein, all that stuff.
15:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
15:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So, Honda decides to write, he writes the script, he decides to make this movie, and for the special effects, he brings in a legendary special effects coordinator named Aegee Subuta, yeah?
16:06
[SPEAKER_02]: who did the effects for over 250 films, including all of the Godzilla movies through the 1950s and 1960s.
16:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow, there's also responsible for several of Kudasawa's more famous films, like Throne of Blood in the Hidden of Fortress.
16:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And he also created the Ultraman series.
16:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Come on, with love, old German.
16:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, well, like, he actually built the studio, like he created the studio that ended up producing old German.
16:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So he is kind of a major creator of, we talked about his studio as in company and the physical space.
16:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And so he's a major originator of that Tokusatsu style of special effects that we talked about with the supination and the different models that the actor wearing the monster suit is interacting with.
17:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and so this, you know, is kind of the beginning of all that on, uh, in, in, in Japanese film.
17:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, I also want to mention, I'm not going to go through all the actors and actresses and, and so forth, because many of them won't register for, uh, a non-Japanese audience, but I do want to mention Tokashi Shimura, because he was notable for being in about 21 out of Kurosawa's 30 films.
17:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
17:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Our listenership may know him as he was the lead in the 7 Samurai, the older Samurai who was kind of mentoring everyone and the one in the group.
17:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
17:44
[SPEAKER_02]: He was also in Eqitu.
17:47
[SPEAKER_02]: He was the main lead in that.
17:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So he was the man who was.
17:52
[SPEAKER_02]: given a cancer diagnosis and only had a short time to live and so it's going through the end of his life trying to figure out.
18:00
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, he does over a hundred or I'm sorry, over 200 movies in the span of his career.
18:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So probably somebody that that, you know, did you pay if you watched Japanese movies from the 50s, 60s?
18:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there a way that Japan will recognize civic contributions to national culture in the UK you would get a you know he might be you know sir You know they do and in fact I think he Have received something like that.
18:36
[SPEAKER_02]: I'd have to like look at it right real quick to to find it, but I'm sure it's on
18:41
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, somebody can post it in the discord when you get those channels up, but yeah, many of many Japanese actors and directors and so forth who have these kinds of careers are awarded lifetime achievement recognition and so on and so forth.
19:04
[SPEAKER_02]: The movie itself was released on
19:12
[SPEAKER_02]: gosh what seven months after the incident with the electric dragon number five, it's notable because this is also the date of the 1947 constitution, the SO the anniversary of the constitution going into effect.
19:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's also the Meiji Emperor's birthday.
19:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So the Emperor from 1868 to 1912, his birthday is a national holiday, even still, they just don't call it his birthday anymore.
19:42
[SPEAKER_02]: They call it cultured day, but...
19:46
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a, there's a, a purpose to the date here that I go through with my students as well.
19:53
[SPEAKER_02]: So one of the mentioned here here at your feet.
19:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So these, these dates matter.
19:57
[SPEAKER_03]: They're important is that an important factor in Japanese culture is days that have some sort of auspiciousness to them it is.
20:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if it's so much auspiciousness is it's tying it to both.
20:11
[SPEAKER_02]: the major emperor and the changes that Japan went through underneath the major emperor.
20:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course, that was the restoration and or revolution depending on how you wanna characterize it where Japan got rid of the old shogunette.
20:28
[SPEAKER_02]: and instituted a more modern governmental system underneath the emperor.
20:33
[SPEAKER_02]: But also I think given the themes of the movie, it's important to recognize that it releases on the same, you know, on the anniversary of the Constitution being promulgated in 1947.
20:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
20:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So you, you know, you have article nine that we just talked about, which is one of the main,
20:52
[SPEAKER_03]: more well known, I guess, parts of the constitution.
20:55
[SPEAKER_03]: He feature of the country.
20:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And here we have a movie about a threat to Japan, where they have to use, or at least consider using military force in order to protect it, and what are they going to do, and so on and so forth.
21:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think my question too was, are our calendar dates an important thing?
21:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Like we might have a particular, oh, you know, this this holiday falls in this day.
21:18
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just kind of that day.
21:20
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not necessarily within Japanese culture are these dates to the carrier special kind of an extra spin to them, so to speak.
21:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, so like I said, the the birthdays of
21:32
[SPEAKER_02]: former emperors dating back to magia are all now national holidays they just okay once the emperor passes away in a new emperors in charge that new emperors birthday becomes the emperors birthday holiday and the previous emperors birthday is named a new holiday so in Japan it's known it's culture day okay
21:54
[SPEAKER_02]: The show at Emperor Hita Hito's birthday is like a Marine day, so because he was a marine biologist.
22:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so it's a day for the celebration of Marine life.
22:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Mostly people not about it care because it's part of a series of holidays called Golden Week.
22:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So basically the whole country takes like a week off.
22:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Nice.
22:14
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really hard to get hotel rooms anywhere, of course, because everybody's doing it.
22:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
22:19
[SPEAKER_03]: So anyway, one quick follow up point on the lucky dragon number five thing, which I think adds a little bit of additional context and a little bit of additional spin to the the whole issue around that is.
22:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Some other secondary effects from the lucky dragon number five thing and our dear friend Aisha who has the every single sci-fi film ever podcast one of her early episodes was on the godzilla movie and she had a couple of of great guests on and I pulled a couple of quotes when I was listening to her podcast to prep for our conversation
23:06
[SPEAKER_03]: at DePaul University and her work focuses largely around the ethics of nuclear discourse.
23:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And she had a really insightful thing about lucky dragon number five.
23:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So let's listen to that really quick.
23:17
[SPEAKER_00]: When this incident took place, which was placed on March 5th, 1954, one of the nuclear tests conducted by the U.S. That was
23:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There was each bomb, which was far bigger than the scientists had anticipated.
23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So this Japanese tuna fishing board, which was in the Pacific, they were outside the designated area, but nonetheless they got caught in the nuclear fallout.
23:47
[SPEAKER_00]: and they saw the flash going off and then immediately they knew what it meant.
23:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So they immediately turned around and went back to the Japanese port.
23:59
[SPEAKER_00]: The sorcery impact of this incident was enormous, for example, because it was only 90 years after the war.
24:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But this incident was much more impactful because it affected the food, affected the fish.
24:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The fish that this lucky job number five brought back to Japan were also emanating radiation and radioactive.
24:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So radioactive tuna became a phrase that people were afraid of consuming and the consumption of fish plummeted.
24:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So I thought that was really interesting that it's not only, oh, here's a little reminder, it's, you know, that, oh, we, you know, we were the target of this and it's a live issue, right?
24:45
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a ongoing thing.
24:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
24:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Is that the,
24:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, our livelihoods, you know, the sea is a major important part of who we are as a nation and how we feed ourselves.
24:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And so all of this, anything in this realm is very affecting.
25:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And so when you were talking about how the incident, you know, re-stoped into US and anti-nuclear sentiments.
25:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, man, it's not just like, oh, this one boat got caught in a blast radius.
25:13
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the radioactive tuna is now something we've got our very food source, our very, you know, deep down this thing affects us all the way to our very,
25:26
[SPEAKER_02]: ability to exist.
25:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And since you bring that up, I feel I need to.
25:30
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a part of a continuing problem with whether it's radiation or pollution, you know, all through the 1960s and 70s, we have issues with pollution affecting food supply.
25:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And then even if you go to 2011,
25:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And the triple disaster, as it's known in Japan, the earthquake and tsunami which result in the shutdown of the Fukushima nuclear reactor.
26:03
[SPEAKER_02]: for a long time, even potentially up to today for some people, they don't want to consume food that's coming from the Fukushima region.
26:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, one of their big exports to outside of the region to the rest of the country was different kinds of beef and food and so forth.
26:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And so the fears of
26:27
[SPEAKER_02]: either radioactive or in some way contaminated food that we see with this, continue on with any kind of incident like this.
26:36
[SPEAKER_02]: So it is a very active thing in, you know, the the social and and political discourse we see.
26:45
[SPEAKER_03]: that the shin godzilla movies are in some way connected to the Fukushima channel.
26:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
26:53
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not going into it.
26:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Is there a shin movie coming up?
26:57
[SPEAKER_03]: There is one in production.
27:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so I don't know where we'll get the released, but we will definitely have to talk about that in the game.
27:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, but the 2016 Shin Godzilla movie is Absolutely a critique of the government handling of the triple disaster in 2011.
27:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So I started to fascinating.
27:19
[SPEAKER_03]: I started to watch it the other night, a busy life-a-family web-a-blast.
27:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I just got to the beginnings of it, watching how the government's functioning to this weird disaster thing.
27:29
[SPEAKER_03]: It reminds me a lot of a clover field style vibe.
27:33
[SPEAKER_03]: We almost covered that for some subscriber stuff for October, for a scooper, for a scooper.
27:38
[SPEAKER_03]: The extras is one out by one vote, though.
27:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm a little bit chagrined, but I was like, oh, wow, this is so interesting.
27:46
[SPEAKER_02]: It's definitely a different watch vibe than any other of the Godzilla movies.
27:53
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a bureaucratic comedy at times.
27:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And I watched it the the the the the first time and just fell out of my chair laughing as somebody who had.
28:03
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, Dunley is on work with the Japanese government and the Japanese military, and so that's another one, you know, I show that and all right, I'd make that available to my students as well as an option for them to write about, but okay, well we'll have to go back to that definitely when that movie is in pre-production, we'll have to come in touch on the Shin Godzilla stuff because it's an interesting, it's super interesting take from what I've been researching.
28:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, carry on with.
28:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so me and thread here.
28:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's just to go kind of go quickly through the story of the 1954 movie we've been with a scene of a job when I guess this is your spoiler warning.
28:43
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't really say it at the top.
28:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is your spoiler warning.
28:47
[SPEAKER_02]: We're going to have it seen this movie that was that came out in 1954.
28:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry.
28:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry.
28:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm willing.
28:55
[SPEAKER_03]: And I will say if you haven't, you should, because it's actually a pretty good movie, especially for, well, let's, we'll talk about a special effects of whatever later.
29:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
29:05
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's, it's a good movie.
29:06
[SPEAKER_03]: It is.
29:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It is.
29:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It is.
29:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It is.
29:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It is.
29:08
[SPEAKER_03]: It is.
29:08
[SPEAKER_03]: It is.
29:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so the opening scene is of a Japanese ship, the A. Cole motto number five, which is an obvious call back to the lucky dragon number five.
29:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And not knowing that when I was watching this the other day because I hadn't done a bunch of these research.
29:24
[SPEAKER_03]: I'd watch the movie the 54 movie first.
29:26
[SPEAKER_03]: And I was like, now that all makes sense.
29:28
[SPEAKER_03]: I ties in really absolutely well.
29:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
29:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So we see it, you know, destroyed by some sort of radioactive flash, which of course is reminiscent of stories of what the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the big flash and then a blast.
29:46
[SPEAKER_02]: And then later on, Godzilla attacks a village on a small island, you know, seemingly these things are related.
29:53
[SPEAKER_02]: The Japanese government sends a team led by a paleontologist, the aforementioned, you know, played by the aforementioned Shimoda Takashi.
30:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And it confirms that Godzilla is a radioactive giant T-rex-like dinosaur.
30:12
[SPEAKER_02]: The dispatch ships to try to kill Godzilla with a depth charges, but it doesn't work.
30:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, Yamane, the paleontologist is very frustrated, because as a man of science, he thinks that Godzilla should be studied and it kind of sets up this tension through the movie of
30:31
[SPEAKER_02]: you know, should we be killing this monster?
30:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Should we be studying this monster?
30:35
[SPEAKER_02]: How should we handle this thing?
30:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Which ties into both King Kong and the monster stories from the United States with Frankenstein.
30:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
30:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Because we have the mad scientist stuff.
30:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the whole atomic age American monster movies where it's this tension between science and nature.
30:55
[SPEAKER_03]: That's right.
30:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So, speaking of that, so there's also, we're introduced to this love triangle between young man and his daughter and we go to the Mad Scientist in the movie, which is a doctor
31:18
[SPEAKER_02]: He's Emiko's arranged marriage partner as a junior of Yamane, in class and status in the reading and what have you.
31:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
31:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, he's a very dark and brooding character.
31:31
[SPEAKER_02]: He has an eye patch and an excar on his face.
31:35
[SPEAKER_02]: He's very reclusive and mysterious.
31:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And sets up almost kind of as a bad guy or the stereotypical mad scientist at first.
31:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Emiko is actually interested in in love with a man named Ogata who is a ship diving captain in you know the salvage service and so Emiko
32:04
[SPEAKER_02]: visit city zawa and is shown this this invention of his called the oxygen destroyer which disintegrates oxygen atoms and electrifies the remains and he's very concerned about this information getting out and being misused by the powers of the world turned into a weapon uh... so he swears her to secrecy
32:23
[SPEAKER_02]: but after Godzilla attacks Tokyo and they go can't handle it anymore, she sees that this weapon is the only thing that can defeat Godzilla.
32:31
[SPEAKER_02]: So she tells Ogata and they go to confront him and try to convince him to allow the weapon to be used against Godzilla.
32:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And he initially refuses, but then, of course, on the TV in there in his office, we have so very conveniently.
32:50
[SPEAKER_02]: We have a broadcast that shows the destruction of Tokyo and the efforts of survivors and all the wounded being tended to and you know they're singing by a girl's choir layered on top of it and of it convinces him that okay this one time we can you know we can use the weapon but he takes care to burn all of his notes so that it can never be used again.
33:19
[SPEAKER_02]: The three of them plus Yamanne, the paleontologists go on a ship into Tokyo Bay.
33:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And Ogata and Sita Yuzawa dive down to the bottom in diving suits connected to the top with the air hoses.
33:36
[SPEAKER_02]: and they plant the device, oh, God, it sends to the surface and he assumes that his out was behind him, but he's not.
33:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And so when oh, God, it gets to the surface and is there, it realizes that that that's that he's out was not coming up.
33:48
[SPEAKER_02]: He calls down via the communications link to him.
33:51
[SPEAKER_02]: And Settizawa says, you know, wishes him to have a happy life with Emiko.
33:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So apparently, he picked up on the idea that oh, got to an Emiko where we're an item.
34:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And he then cuts through the lines that connecting to the ship so that when they try to pull him up, all that comes up is like an empty cord.
34:12
[SPEAKER_02]: He sets the device, turns it on, and it kills both him and Godzilla.
34:19
[SPEAKER_02]: taking the knowledge of the weapon with him so that he can't be forced to give up his secret knowledge and enable a new kind of weapon of mass destruction.
34:30
[SPEAKER_03]: You think you did something about human nature?
34:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Mm, that moment.
34:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Mm, maybe.
34:36
[SPEAKER_02]: The movie ends then with Yamane, the paleontologist, speculating that another Godzilla may arise if things like nuclear testing continue to occur.
34:50
[SPEAKER_03]: And something you mentioned in the context and history was that Toho Studios requires any licensee to never ultimately kill off Godzilla that Godzilla always there there must be always a sort of pre credit post credit stinger of
35:10
[SPEAKER_02]: to be continued dot dot something.
35:12
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, some sort of indication that there's a possibility continuing and you know and so that that sort of quote unquote DNA goes all the way that way back to that the idea that you know did they have the idea for a sequel in mind already?
35:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
35:28
[SPEAKER_02]: I am readily just going to ask that.
35:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say actually, I mean, they didn't know whether it would be, but from that allegory standpoint, it is the warning that if we continue to mess with these really powerful forces, then this horror could return.
35:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
35:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And so we need to, it's a maybe a note of caution or a check to people, because this is also going to be
35:55
[SPEAKER_03]: being watched by the citizenry.
35:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And so this in a way is a little bit of moral teaching.
36:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Hey everybody, keep an eye in your government because they may try to mess around again, a bit again, future.
36:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And kind of a plea to the world, right?
36:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Just, you know, just again.
36:16
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's not Japan that's doing the messing around that causes this, it's other powers.
36:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so yeah, you know, we talked about the, the, the special effects and the, the different style of, uh, of special effects like Tolcusatu, yeah, and and suitmation in the, in the first podcast, so we don't need to necessarily rehash it, but this sets the standard, um,
36:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And as we said, the effects director, Tsubudaya, is really the guy moving forward, who popularizes all of this.
36:55
[SPEAKER_02]: One thing to note, if you've seen one of the later gods of the movies, but you haven't seen this.
36:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And my later, I mean, 60s and 70s, this is a very different tone.
37:03
[SPEAKER_02]: People are often very surprised.
37:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And it is Godzilla is not cuddly at all in this movie, it is, it is meant to be scary and I think for 1954 probably was very scary.
37:22
[SPEAKER_03]: We've come a long way since then, but when you add in all of these real world effects like radioactive tuna and what's the Sarah Zawa?
37:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, has a scar and he's visibly injured, but they don't explain to us why or what caused that.
37:42
[SPEAKER_03]: But I could imagine that it wouldn't be uncommon for a lot of your fellow citizenry to be continuing to show visible signs of the war on the absolute.
37:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
37:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there's a lot of signaling in this movie about that I think would resonate and be very palpable in the movie theater.
38:04
[SPEAKER_03]: If you were to see this on, you know, it's initial releasing.
38:08
[SPEAKER_02]: certainly agree with that.
38:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know that's one of the things I try to get my students to understand is it's hard for 18 to 22 year olds to put themselves in the seats of 1954 movie goers.
38:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
38:22
[SPEAKER_02]: But I explain
38:23
[SPEAKER_03]: It's hard for me as a 50-something-year-old man to put myself in a there, but my brain is cooked, right?
38:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I have a fully functioning brain, whereas the 19 and 20-year-olds are still, so, you know, connecting those poor ghosts through all of this with it to get them to understand this.
38:40
[SPEAKER_02]: For the time this was scary, this was frightening, you know, the context.
38:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And this, you know, I hear this from time to time, not so much anymore, since I'm very distant from the college, the world of university and college, but I had a cousin who I remember who's studying mathematics and engineering and he was grumbling about having to take humanities courses and like, bro, no like now I'm like,
39:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh no, you guys, especially you engineers and scientists, you need to be taking humanities because you need to remember that we are human beings at the end of the day and not, you know, and the effects of your science and this is a major plot of the story, right?
39:25
[SPEAKER_03]: with Sarasawa having, this is science defeating science.
39:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, right Godzilla as this, you know, victim conceivably he was just some little creature down there at the bottom of the ocean and he gets irradiated and it sort of drives well he already existed right the old island the guy in the islands at all will we have this god down there.
39:45
[SPEAKER_03]: But Godzilla is just sort of mostly being peaceful and he gets irradiated.
39:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So he's a little bit victim.
39:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think we talked about that in the last podcast.
39:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And, but it's a result of science.
40:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And so Sarazawa is understanding his fellow scientists, inclination, to pursue that he found the oxygen destroyer by mistake.
40:12
[SPEAKER_03]: He was just interested in oxygen, and he discovered this incredibly powerful thing.
40:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Kind of like the atom, oh, the atom is cool.
40:19
[SPEAKER_03]: What happens if we split it?
40:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, shit.
40:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
40:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
40:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
40:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's like, well, what can we do with it?
40:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And then the government, the military, I can't belong, no, thank you very much.
40:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And off you go.
40:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's, it's very pressient in that, pressied in that way.
40:32
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a really great social commentary.
40:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Very clear I'd social commentary on what it is that we human beings will get up to.
40:41
[SPEAKER_03]: We're pursuing science for.
40:43
[SPEAKER_03]: altruistic purposes, and oops, things don't always work out the way our altrism would have allowed you know that we had thought originally.
40:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes, I mean the you know we we've mentioned it already but the anti nuclear and anti war themes are kind of prevalent throughout it and this is matching that with the idea of you know scientific weaponry
41:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And in some ways, you know, the hubris of man as he messes with forces that he doesn't understand and and and creates things that have these effects.
41:25
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, we know a lot more now, obviously, than we did in the 1950s.
41:29
[SPEAKER_02]: But in the 1950s, we were still learning about what the effects of radiation were.
41:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And so much, many of the fears that we talked about may or may not have been unfounded, or at least over-exaggerated because of as they were unknown, but certainly the idea that
41:54
[SPEAKER_02]: monster with a destructive force was was something that resonated.
42:01
[SPEAKER_02]: I also think we need to talk about the idea of settisawa as, you know, personal sacrifice, right, and the way that he and I think you, you know, put the notes in this.
42:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if you want to take the lead on it, but
42:19
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, he doesn't tell anybody that he's going to destroy himself at the end until he actually does it, but he, you know, realizes that the only way that he can be certain that nobody misheases his technology is to not only destroy his notes, but just destroy himself.
42:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is an interesting.
42:43
[SPEAKER_03]: counter, I don't want to say counterpoint.
42:45
[SPEAKER_03]: But when we start talking about minus one versus 54, this is a key message of 54, self-sacrifice.
42:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And sacrifice for the great and good night.
42:56
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to be stereotypical about Japanese culture, because I don't know anything about Japanese culture, except for what I know from sort of modern entertainment industry.
43:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
43:06
[SPEAKER_03]: But the idea that the individual and the collective,
43:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And that in this case, Sarazawa sees that his path is for this self-sacrifice.
43:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Whereas in minus one, the message is, you have to live.
43:34
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't work yourself to death.
43:35
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't sacrifice yourself.
43:37
[SPEAKER_03]: You need to be there to carry on for the next generation, right?
43:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's a, you know, at the same time, and we'll talk about that Godzilla design in there, but they're bringing back a whole bunch of stuff from 54 into the minus one movie, but yet here, this is a really fundamental change in what the,
43:59
[SPEAKER_03]: the movie is saying to us, and we see collective action, we see the government coming together, we see military forces responding to this threat.
44:12
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's all very kind of abstract government response, and it's all very sort of top down as well.
44:17
[SPEAKER_03]: We see a bunch of pilots who can't seem to aim their rockets.
44:22
[SPEAKER_03]: I was stealing your joke there, but it's up to this one man who has this knowledge, but he's also very distrustful of his own.
44:37
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I don't want to say industry, his own academic practice or his own right of human nature.
44:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
44:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think it's important, even if, you know, not even going to minus one yet, just looking at his sacrifice in the movie versus the sacrifices that were demanded of the Japanese people during World War II in the name of the Emperor, or in the name of, you know, winning the war,
45:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And in many times, we're wasteful, at least from an outside perspective.
45:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't think I need to rehash kind of those images.
45:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I think everybody understands if they've read anything about World War II.
45:19
[SPEAKER_02]: But the fact that studies are sacrificing himself, but he's doing it a of his own volition.
45:26
[SPEAKER_02]: and be it is serving a greater good not just the glory of the empire or something like that.
45:33
[SPEAKER_02]: It's saving humanity and ending a conflict instead of being part of that conflict.
45:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I think is a major shift from that that that a Japanese audience member of 1954 would recognize and resonate with them.
45:50
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I'm just saying.
45:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And then it's it's also interesting with the love triangle.
45:54
[SPEAKER_03]: He's not bitter or resentful about What's your name?
46:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Emiko's interest in Ogata and he gives her permission.
46:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Have a happy life and in some ways that's also Saying to the Japanese people the audience, you know, there's horror here.
46:18
[SPEAKER_03]: But don't let that stop you from living your life.
46:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you got to go on.
46:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, and I think that actually does quite well meshing with what we'll talk about when we come up to mind this one.
46:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
46:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So.
46:35
[SPEAKER_03]: You want to talk about the rock.
46:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was looking at some of the things that didn't work because I don't have nitpicks.
46:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I, you know, we do have to understand it is a 1954 movie.
46:46
[SPEAKER_02]: So some of the acting scenes are pretty contrived, the scene where cities that would demonstrate the oxygen destroyer to Greco.
46:56
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... we see like the fish just kind of dissolve and emico go screen we don't even see the fish do we even see the fish do we do in the second right seen of it when we get the kind of what actually happened what happened right a little flash-off scene but it's he turns away in just screams and horror yes
47:15
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's very 1950s horror movie screen kind of kind of thing and then you mentioned the the jets attacking Godzilla they're firing rockets at him and I'm just watching it the whole time they don't hit him at all they're just like
47:30
[SPEAKER_02]: know we're even near him.
47:31
[SPEAKER_02]: They're just randomly spraying rockets and I'm thinking how much collateral damage are they doing?
47:36
[SPEAKER_02]: How many people are dying?
47:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Not because of Godzilla, but because the jets are shooting rockets all over the place and missing just well I think not by their purpose but by a secondary meaning that we decoding that we can take out of this is that yeah fighting
47:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's when we look at a war machine that is rampaging across a globe and the amount of resource and material and what has to be done to stop that war machine.
48:17
[SPEAKER_03]: is as equally horrifying and heightened and indebtedly and indeed.
48:23
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'd be remiss.
48:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I know I said I wouldn't go into Shinagadzilla, but I'm going to you for just a brief sack.
48:28
[SPEAKER_02]: We can't help it, though.
48:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so, is it, is it?
48:32
[SPEAKER_02]: It's interesting to contrast this with Shin Godzilla because there are scenes in Shin Godzilla where they have self defense force helicopters lined up to take the shot and hit Godzilla with rockets and they have to get all clear from the Prime Minister because of the way the Constitution is written, it has to come directly from him and they're just about to give the all clear and then
49:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Grandma with a cane walking across the crossing of the road and the train tracks and so immediately they have to stop everything and can't fire because there's one civilian who wasn't evacuated
49:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And so in the context of Shengadzilla, this is about the restrictions on Japan, the Japanese military, whether they should have these kinds of things and that prevent them from engaging a threat.
49:26
[SPEAKER_02]: But here we have the original one made almost immediately after the constitution and it's fire away, just blow the city away.
49:38
[SPEAKER_02]: That's interesting to me.
49:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, Shin Godzilla, maybe later time, different movie.
49:45
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the things that didn't work for me was the beginning of the movie is very snappy.
49:50
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't waste a lot of time getting in, getting into the issues, setting up the world.
49:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there's that points or it just sort of drags and it just feels, it sort of changes down shifts.
50:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Now that may be movie-going sensibility of that time.
50:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not enough of a cinema buff or a film historian to really understand the, the, the, the, you know, the thinking of how the creative process for, for maybe at that time.
50:18
[SPEAKER_02]: The pacing decisions.
50:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
50:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
50:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And it just kind of, whoa, slows down.
50:22
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there's great things like where there's just,
50:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, the radio wasn't off and then suddenly there's, you know, there's suddenly a broadcast from a device and you're like, oh, was the radio on all the time was the TV on all the time.
50:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
50:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
50:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's a bunch of, you know, a little weird things like that.
50:38
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's, you know, that's fine.
50:39
[SPEAKER_03]: That's of the time and of the day.
50:42
[SPEAKER_03]: But I don't have that many critiques or criticisms beyond just that strange pacing.
50:50
[SPEAKER_03]: which I'm willing to allow for, it's a movie from 1954.
50:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Otherwise, the special effects, despite the rockets, the monster, the puppetry, the suit-mation stuff, it's all pretty ground-by-breaking.
51:07
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a ground-breaking.
51:08
[SPEAKER_03]: It really advances the art form and it really advances the kind of storytelling.
51:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think what I compare it, I haven't watched of Frankenstein
51:18
[SPEAKER_03]: a Dracula from the mid-50s, but I definitely have seen them, and I'm thinking of 54.
51:25
[SPEAKER_03]: 54 has an intentional craft to it.
51:30
[SPEAKER_03]: It has a point of view.
51:31
[SPEAKER_03]: It's trying to say something.
51:33
[SPEAKER_03]: There's nutrition here inside of this fluff.
51:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Whereas, yeah, later on when we get, you know, monster island stuff, it gets a little silly, and a little bit goofy.
51:45
[SPEAKER_03]: But really, there's some amazing, the inversion of Sarah's Alwa, the Amiko's sort of personal agency.
51:55
[SPEAKER_03]: She's, you know, where there's an early scene of them, where O'Gatza's like, oh, I just got called into work.
52:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So you'll have to go to the concert by yourself.
52:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Amiko's like, OK, bye.
52:05
[SPEAKER_03]: She just heads out, you know.
52:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So you, I think you had mentioned this when we did our first recording, and I don't think it's in the first podcast, I think it was in the Cutting Room floor, right?
52:17
[SPEAKER_03]: But you were talking about the Parliament?
52:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, so there's a scene where there, you know, Yamane, the biologist is briefing a parliamentary committee and there's members of the multiple parties or what have you in there.
52:34
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the politicians, male politician gets up and starts talking about how they can't release this information to the public and whatever.
52:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's immediately attacked by a group of women, politicians, women, diet members who are saying, no, we have to tell the public and we have to do this.
52:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And that parts stuck out to me because
52:56
[SPEAKER_02]: It's only with the 1947 constitution that women are even given the right to vote and become members of, or participants in politics in this way.
53:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And so here we have a scene where not only are women participating in politics, but they're diet members, they're members of the polyamentary system and they're voicing their opinions very strongly.
53:26
[SPEAKER_02]: They do need to let the public know.
53:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
53:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I just thought that was very interesting that for the movie in 1954, it even included women in the scene when it was such a recent relatively thing.
53:43
[SPEAKER_02]: I thought that was nicely done.
53:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And we tell, go ahead.
53:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I was going to say, since we're on it, I'll just talk about there's two moments in the movie that I really want to make sure that I get in as kind of my favorites.
53:58
[SPEAKER_02]: One of them is there's a scene during Godzilla's attack where there's a woman and she's holding her child.
54:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And you get the sense that they're about to be crushed by a falling building being knocked over or something like that.
54:13
[SPEAKER_02]: And she says, don't worry, you know,
54:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not explained anything beyond that, but the assumption that you can take from the scene, right, is that dad died in the war in some way, shape or form.
54:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is a, you know, child who has grown up without a father.
54:36
[SPEAKER_02]: and so as being, as mom realizes that they're going to die right now, she's comforting the child and probably herself by saying, well, we'll get to be with, you know, my husband, your father in heaven or wherever soon.
54:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's just when that would just like, it's me, you know?
54:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
54:58
[SPEAKER_02]: The other scene is, as Godzilla is rampaging across the city, there's a reporter and film crew and other backup that are standing on the top of this building or tower and the reporter is describing the attack for the radio audience or the TV audience or whatever is being recorded behind him.
55:23
[SPEAKER_02]: and like he's literally giving play by play watching the monster come towards them speculating oh you know it's too late for us to run are we going to die do you know stay tuned and see and then of course Godzilla comes and knocks the building over and every all the camera crew and the reporter and all fall off to their death.
55:44
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not a very like uplifting scene, of course, but it's interesting just kind of to watch in 54 and I bring it up because it comes back in later movies.
55:55
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, there's a recreation of the scene in both Shengadzilla and in minus one, which we'll, we'll get to, of course.
56:04
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's other scenes in minus one, too.
56:07
[SPEAKER_03]: The continuation of these echoes is just something that I just love to say.
56:11
[SPEAKER_03]: it's a lot of fun.
56:12
[SPEAKER_03]: Should we make a couple of quick notes about 56 and then we'll take our break and then we'll come back and we'll talk about minus one.
56:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, let's let's do that.
56:22
[SPEAKER_02]: So the in 1956 a cut of Godzilla.
56:28
[SPEAKER_02]: was released in the U.S. under the title, Godzilla King of the Monsters.
56:34
[SPEAKER_02]: It was heavily re-edited in an inserted Raymond Burr who I think was an up and coming actor at the time.
56:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's what we write.
56:42
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it was.
56:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
56:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And he is the lead in this movie that has been kind of edited to make him the focal point, playing an American reporter on the scene.
56:56
[SPEAKER_02]: It was cut in some ways with, you know, new footage, splicing him in and using body doubles in other places to kind of recreate the Japanese characters that he should be interacting with, but didn't obviously, because he wasn't in the original.
57:14
[SPEAKER_02]: and they removed most of the references to atomic testing by the United States.
57:21
[SPEAKER_02]: The scenes of destruction and suffering in the city caused by Godzilla's rampage because they didn't want, you know, those were toned down because they didn't want American audiences associating that with.
57:34
[SPEAKER_03]: the World War II era bombing and feeling some kind of way about it and prior to that, I would imagine that American audiences were being plied quite heavily with propaganda, you know, or American American favorite, favorite news reels at the movie theater.
57:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And obviously,
58:02
[SPEAKER_03]: carried on for a little while after the war in Europe had ended.
58:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And so there was probably, so suddenly this focus switches over to that.
58:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, it you for quite a number of years.
58:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The the 1956 version also removes any references that could be interpreted as references to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, because you couldn't portray the bombings, the U.S. bombings of
58:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So right, the whole narrative was that the bombings of those two cities with nuclear weapons were necessary in order to end the war and, you know, there's been so much academic ink spilled over that question, we're not going to litigate that you're not going to do it, but
58:51
[SPEAKER_02]: It's interesting to me that that was part of the editing as well was to take out anything that that cast a negative light on that because America's got to be the hero and so they re-edited it with an American protagonist, you know, just dropped into the movie, right?
59:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And a focus on things where, you know, it's not the Americans us the back to.
59:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's, I think this version then is where we start to get that fundamental shifting away from social commentary, away from allegory and metaphor.
59:30
[SPEAKER_03]: and really into, this is a franchise that we can make a bunch of films out of, it's entertainment, it's wrestling entertainment literally because we see the suitzilla fighting later is sort of a proto-wrestling style, if you will.
59:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think it really sets up for it, even all the way
59:59
[SPEAKER_03]: the monster versus two legendary because this is just about monster fighting and CGI budgets, then it is about thoughts about society and science and relationships and all of this kind of stuff.
1:00:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Whatever social commentary is in the monster verse movies and I haven't not seen all of them.
1:00:20
[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't want to, you know, just breathe on that just marriage.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_03]: All of them.
1:00:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
1:00:24
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
1:00:25
[SPEAKER_03]: But whatever is there is certainly it's there as part of the story, but it's not the focus.
1:00:31
[SPEAKER_02]: No, whereas it is absolutely the point in Godzilla 1954 and a couple of the Godzilla movies that come after and then several of the series reboots start with those sorts of themes.
1:00:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.
1:00:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Cool.
1:00:50
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, well, should we take our break and then we'll come back and we'll talk about minus one.
1:00:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's do it.
1:01:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're back.
1:01:05
[SPEAKER_03]: All right.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_03]: So let's talk about the 2023 movie Godzilla minus one.
1:01:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I remember when this came out, a couple of things.
1:01:15
[SPEAKER_03]: One, I had no idea that it was coming out.
1:01:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It was just suddenly suddenly arrived.
1:01:18
[SPEAKER_03]: It was like right.
1:01:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Hello.
1:01:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I remember seeing it in the theater.
1:01:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And I felt really conflicted and I didn't necessarily enjoy it, not only because the theater are local, it was in one of the smaller little theater rooms and it's the most uncomfortable chairs and the screen is in that great, a blah, blah, blah.
1:01:39
[SPEAKER_03]: But then I think I didn't have the right
1:01:49
[SPEAKER_03]: from the, like a Toho Godzilla film.
1:01:52
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm thinking of the monster fighting wrestling WrestleMania stuff, right?
1:01:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Or I'm thinking the new monster verse from legendary.
1:02:02
[SPEAKER_03]: So my calibration for what this movie was trying to do and what it's trying to say, my appreciation for it was,
1:02:09
[SPEAKER_03]: like I had no I was it was almost serious it was and I didn't understand it and then because the TGI of this movie is a little rain you know it's it's not bad and there's nothing wrong with it it's just not like it's not maybe something what I'm used to.
1:02:26
[SPEAKER_03]: I came away with it from this movie just going like what and I keep hearing people talk about it's really great it's over great so now as we're going into this I'm like oh
1:02:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, I'm calibrated to what this movie is saying and what this movie is doing, historically, and contextually, I can actually start to see some of these deeper stuff that's going on here, and so now I'm a little bit more excited to see what they're going to do with mine as zero.
1:02:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So,
1:02:51
[SPEAKER_03]: that said why don't you set us up for some of the basics what's the you know what's the what are the production basics here and what are we looking at as a film okay so godzilla zero minus one was released in uh 2023 on November 3rd in Japan remember the way i said that day
1:03:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's it's like I told my students everything I say is check off the gun.
1:03:19
[SPEAKER_02]: It's gonna come back around Right, so yeah, it was released on the 70th year or I guess it was the 69th actually, but they build it as the 70th anniversary going into it Whatever, then it was released in December 1st in the United States It was written by and directed by Takashi Yamazaki
1:03:42
[SPEAKER_02]: who, finally enough, when he, he's got a quote from because this is the first tall whole film with Godzilla to come after Shin Godzilla.
1:03:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And his quote about when he was told, okay, you're making the next Godzilla movie.
1:03:59
[SPEAKER_02]: He was like, Shin Godzilla was amazing.
1:04:02
[SPEAKER_02]: When Toho asked me if I would do the next Godzilla movie, I could only think, I have to follow Shin.
1:04:08
[SPEAKER_02]: So, but he's an experienced writer and director.
1:04:12
[SPEAKER_02]: I had to work on several movies, the Great War of our comedies, The Fighter Pilot, which was about a zero pilot, and he was actually the filmographer or the director of filmography for the Tokyo Olympics that took place in 2021.
1:04:35
[SPEAKER_03]: the pilot is the primary protagonist in indeed and it looks like I watched the two trailers for minus zero before we recorded today and there's a lot of airplane action going on and there as well.
1:04:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't wonder now knowing that fact that oh this this might be a through line yes from this director.
1:04:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So, um, just other, you know, numbers, uh, the budget for the movie was 15 million, box office, it made 114 million worldwide, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
1:05:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, it was a 99 and critic score, 98 fan score, so people liked it, uh, unlike David on first watch.
1:05:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Um,
1:05:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And men are going to get a visit as a 81 or an 8.6.
1:05:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And actually funny that you said that about the CGI because Godzilla, this Godzilla movie, was the first Godzilla movie to win an Academy Award, which it won for best visual effects.
1:05:32
[SPEAKER_03]: No way, I had no idea.
1:05:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:05:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh my goodness.
1:05:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
1:05:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Wow.
1:05:37
[SPEAKER_03]: there you go.
1:05:38
[SPEAKER_03]: You're you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you
1:05:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Who am I to argue with the Academy?
1:05:57
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess we'll go quickly through the story here.
1:06:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Sure, but in 1945 so the reason this is called minus one is because the idea is that Godzilla 1954 is
1:06:10
[SPEAKER_02]: this the like the level right and so this begins before that so that's part of this is like a pre story mm-hmm was at least how I understood it when what it was first explained and then we'll get to mine as a zero and they went in a different direction I don't know but the idea is that this is like in this timeline these event events happen before we would have had it in the
1:06:38
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
1:06:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So this allows them to start it earlier.
1:06:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's 1945.
1:06:41
[SPEAKER_02]: World War II is at the very end.
1:06:44
[SPEAKER_02]: It's about to end soon, but it's not over yet.
1:06:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
1:06:49
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's just real quick to.
1:06:50
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an interesting convention.
1:06:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it creatively, it's interesting.
1:06:58
[SPEAKER_03]: because the title is like, wait, it's not oh part one, part two, you know, whatever.
1:07:04
[SPEAKER_03]: It's this minus and plus.
1:07:06
[SPEAKER_03]: So whatever we're going to get, we're going to get Godzilla plus one eventually.
1:07:11
[SPEAKER_03]: And so it's an interesting convention.
1:07:14
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like a countdown, right?
1:07:15
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like T-Magly.
1:07:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's also the world changes at this point, right?
1:07:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, as of zero, right?
1:07:24
[SPEAKER_03]: And now we reset this clock and we move forward.
1:07:28
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when we talk, it's Star Wars, we talk, you know, sort of BBY or, you know, that kind of stuff.
1:07:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So we have these, you know, pre history dates and these posts history dates.
1:07:36
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think it works, but also just visually, it makes the title, again, the way that they've done the graphics.
1:07:42
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really cool.
1:07:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And I have to say it's kind of,
1:07:46
[SPEAKER_03]: a little bit of creative genius, a little stroke of genius, and what they've done.
1:07:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So I really like it.
1:07:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And it certainly sets it apart from the rest of 100%.
1:07:54
[SPEAKER_02]: The Godzilla universe.
1:07:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
1:07:57
[SPEAKER_02]: As its own thing.
1:07:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's un-missakable.
1:08:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
1:08:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
1:08:03
[SPEAKER_03]: And we talk about minus zero minus one.
1:08:05
[SPEAKER_03]: You know exactly which movie it is.
1:08:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know which era, it just situates it perfectly.
1:08:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, Gary on.
1:08:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So, 1945, the war is almost over and our protagonist named Shikushima is a Kamikaze pilot who appears to have mechanical troubles, so he lands at an emergency airfield on this small little island, Odo Island, which is the same name as the one in 1954's movie.
1:08:32
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, they're right, okay cool.
1:08:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's lots of, they really do mine the original, but they do it in a very tasteful way, I think.
1:08:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so that night, Godzilla attacks the Garrison, uh, the lead mechanic Tatybana urges him to use his planes machine gun on the monster, but she can shoot my freezes up and panic, uh, and everyone dies, but the two of them leaving Tatybana to blame Shikishima's inactivity for the death of all, uh, of his comrades.
1:09:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Shikashima returns to Tokyo to find it popped out, and he learns that his parents are dead, and he runs into a former neighbor named Sumeko, who screams at him for coming back alive and not doing his duty, and all of this combined with the events that happened on the island, add to his survivor's guilt, that he feels very heavily throughout the movie.
1:09:29
[SPEAKER_02]: He takes in a young woman who has a baby.
1:09:35
[SPEAKER_02]: The baby is not hers.
1:09:36
[SPEAKER_02]: It's an orphan that she has taken custody of from the mother who passed away.
1:09:43
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's reluctant to do this, but he doesn't really have a choice.
1:09:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Nodiko kind of makes herself at home.
1:09:51
[SPEAKER_02]: and he gets a job supporting his new kind of adopted family as a gunner on a boat that's clearing wartime mines in the waters around Tokyo back.
1:10:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just wanted to make a quick note on this, because one of the things that if you're studying this immediate post-war period that comes out is the number of wartime orphans, because of family dwellings being bombed.
1:10:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And so often times, the children were sent out into the countryside, much like in England during the blitz.
1:10:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Right?
1:10:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So the children who would be in somewhere that was safe and non-interbombing, but the parents would die.
1:10:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you do have quite a large population of orphans.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's interesting to me that they highlight this with Okiko.
1:10:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
1:10:44
[SPEAKER_02]: Here in the movie.
1:10:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and so we fast forward a couple of years, we see that, you know, they are slowly becoming a family, um, meanwhile we get to 1947 and the United States is conducting nuclear testing, just like in the original, and one of these tests mutates Godzilla who resumes the
1:11:15
[SPEAKER_02]: recognizes that this is a threat, but offers no help because they don't want to do anything that would stoke tensions with the Soviet Union.
1:11:24
[SPEAKER_02]: The Japanese government likewise refuses to warn or or publicize this to the public because they don't want to cause a panic.
1:11:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Interesting to me, historically, is that 1947 is around the time that we see the reverse course, or what's known as the reverse course in occupation policy, the Americans at this time, you know, prior to this,
1:11:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Everything was about getting the supposed war criminals out of the government and democratizing Japan and taking away their military capability so that they couldn't ever go to war again and cause a world war to happen again.
1:12:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And by the time we get into the middle of 1947,
1:12:10
[SPEAKER_02]: The U.S. is having second thoughts about that policy because they are, you know, the Cold War has started and they're seeing the way this is that the Soviet Union is flexing its muscles in Europe, flexing its muscles by, you know, propping up a communist regime in North Korea.
1:12:29
[SPEAKER_02]: And then there's a little thing called the domino theory.
1:12:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, there's there's the area.
1:12:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, the Chinese Civil War is going on.
1:12:38
[SPEAKER_02]: So, the US starts thinking, hey, we need to shore up things around the world in Japan as one of these places that we don't want to fall to communism.
1:12:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So, being able to use full location in terms of it and in debt.
1:12:50
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a workforce that can be industrialized.
1:12:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's a great base of operations to influence activities in the Pacific region.
1:12:59
[SPEAKER_02]: So the whole idea of not wanting to stoke tensions with the Soviet Union in the movie fits in this point where the US has larger geopolitical concerns.
1:13:11
[SPEAKER_02]: and so wouldn't want to do anything that that looked like an overly aggressive move, while at the same time they're kind of conserving their forces in case anything happens or becomes right, a problem will get to some problems I have with this here, eventually, but you know understanding the geopolitical context here kind of helps explain how they make this choice.
1:13:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
1:13:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, Shiki Shima's mind-clearing boat runs into Godzilla and manages to stall it a little bit until a former Imperial Japanese Navy ship, the Takau, comes on the scene and engages Godzilla with its guns, Godzilla's attention turns to the Takau and he sinks it with his heat ray,
1:14:04
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they're able to take advantage of kind of Godzilla being distracted.
1:14:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Godzilla makes his way to Japan and attacks Genza, where coincidentally, Nodiko has just gotten a job as a secretary and an office, so Shikashima makes his way to Genza to try to find her and it does, because he wants to get her out of there and protect her.
1:14:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, he says where relative, he says in Tokyo, it's a district in Tokyo.
1:14:35
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a district.
1:14:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, and it's kind of like the high end shopping in business area at the time.
1:14:41
[SPEAKER_02]: Got it.
1:14:42
[SPEAKER_03]: More southeast, wet, like where central.
1:14:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Central, okay.
1:14:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:14:47
[SPEAKER_03]: So, um, you know, because I don't really have a geography in my head.
1:14:51
[SPEAKER_02]: No, it's it is it is primed central Tokyo You know, it's one of the first places that we built which actually she mentions when she talks about getting a job there that much deeper going into Tokyo.
1:15:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
1:15:06
[SPEAKER_03]: A long channel.
1:15:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:15:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
1:15:09
[SPEAKER_02]: So Godzilla is there.
1:15:11
[SPEAKER_02]: He's attacking everybody's running from him.
1:15:14
[SPEAKER_02]: The Japanese military fires tank fire at him and he gets angry.
1:15:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So he unleashes his blast and it levels the area.
1:15:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Shikashima is pushed to safety between two buildings by Nordico, but she's swept away in the blast.
1:15:37
[SPEAKER_02]: So never to be seen again, maybe he is very destroyed.
1:15:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course, Val's revenge, this is, you know, the third time he's out of running with Godzilla and likes people.
1:15:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So, um, and this is the scene.
1:15:55
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the period, the part of the movie where we have the reporter standing on the top of the building, narrating the attack until it is destroyed and it's a absolute call back to the 1954 movie.
1:16:09
[SPEAKER_02]: It's also a call back to the same scene on going in the 2016 movie.
1:16:15
[SPEAKER_02]: But then we're also, once Godzilla is attacked subsides, we see all the aftermath, the victims, the rescue efforts, there's black rain falling, which is reminiscent of the acid rain falling after the nuclear attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
1:16:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have very clear imagery calling back
1:16:43
[SPEAKER_02]: etc.
1:16:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And so in order to do something about this because, you know, the complaint throughout the movie is that the government is incapable, and the U.S. is not doing anything.
1:16:58
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a group of former war veterans, led by a former Navy captain and Nota, who was one of the crew of Shikishima Shipp or Boat, rather, who just happened to have been a weapons development specialist for the Imperial Japanese Navy during the war.
1:17:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, good to have a med scientist among yours.
1:17:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he's really cool.
1:17:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he's our, he's our city's all a stand in, but not nearly as scary, certainly not as coded.
1:17:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
1:17:31
[SPEAKER_02]: But he does have the frizzy hair and the little round spectacles.
1:17:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
1:17:35
[SPEAKER_02]: He looks.
1:17:36
[SPEAKER_02]: You look at him.
1:17:36
[SPEAKER_02]: You're like, yeah, that's right.
1:17:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:17:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So he comes up with a plan that's very convoluted, but the ideas that they're going to use scientific principles in order to sync a Godzilla and then bring him back up and basically get him the bends and this will cause him to explode.
1:18:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And they have former navy ships that they're going to use to kind of enact this plan.
1:18:06
[SPEAKER_02]: But they need Shikashima, who, because he's a pilot to fly a plane in order to distract Godzilla while they put this plane into place, Shikashima reaches out to his old kind of nemesis, or not nemesis, but the Tatubana, the mechanic who blames him for the death of his comrades,
1:18:27
[SPEAKER_02]: and Tatubana agrees in the end to refurbish this fighter.
1:18:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And
1:18:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So she could she was able to take off.
1:18:39
[SPEAKER_02]: He doesn't, the, the, the notice plan doesn't actually go to plan because of course not, of course not.
1:18:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it doesn't finish him.
1:18:48
[SPEAKER_02]: But as Godzilla is readying his, his atomic heat ray to blow everything up.
1:18:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Shekishima flies the fighter into his mouth and it detonates the bombs that are attached to the aircraft, destroying the head and triggering the body's explosion.
1:19:05
[SPEAKER_02]: We think that, or the audience is led to believe that Shikishima died, sacrificing himself, calling back to the fact that he was a Kamikaze pilot who did not do that in the war and feels guilt about it.
1:19:18
[SPEAKER_02]: But we see after a minute or so him floating down to Earth because Tajibana, the mechanic installed an ejection seat.
1:19:30
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was already in the plane and he just
1:19:34
[SPEAKER_02]: No, it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't, this is a plot point because as notice getting his big speech, rallying all the veterans and they're talking about, you know, how the imperial Japanese military sent them out without these things, one of the things he mentioned that they didn't get was ejection seats in their aircraft.
1:19:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, which is why I thought it was there.
1:19:57
[SPEAKER_03]: So I guess, okay, I misread the, the Seattle.
1:20:00
[SPEAKER_02]: No, so then, so then we get a, a scene later, we're talking about it, is showing him specifically.
1:20:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
1:20:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I put this in for you.
1:20:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
1:20:09
[SPEAKER_02]: and telling she could see him.
1:20:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Usually it's not dog.
1:20:11
[SPEAKER_03]: You got to live exactly.
1:20:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And then that ties into his relationship or being a surrogate father to the child and all that stuff.
1:20:20
[SPEAKER_02]: And the forgiveness and that touch you about to show his him for everything that happened and wanting him to live.
1:20:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's a big theme is not only survival, but also
1:20:34
[SPEAKER_03]: moving, healing the trauma and giving people grace and forgiveness, because here we are here where we are now and what are we going to do now, right?
1:20:49
[SPEAKER_03]: We can hold these feelings that's fine, but we have this threat that we have to deal with right now.
1:20:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And so here live your life.
1:20:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, care of.
1:21:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So, they all come back to shore, and Shikishima is given a telegram, which tells him that Nodiko is actually alive.
1:21:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Shocking.
1:21:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So, he rushes to the hospital where she is in a bed, he takes Octico with him and they embrace and we have our family, our created family back together again.
1:21:24
[SPEAKER_02]: But as, you know, we're kind of ending the scene, the camera zooms in to the back of her neck, where there's a strange black mark spreading across of it.
1:21:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the movie cuts to underwater somewhere in Tokyo Bay, there's a chunk of Godzilla's exploded flesh, and it starts bubbling with new growth as the Godzilla March play.
1:21:53
[SPEAKER_02]: You thought this is over.
1:21:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not over.
1:21:54
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not, you know, that total mandates.
1:21:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's the end of the movie.
1:22:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Really quick question on a plot stuff.
1:22:05
[SPEAKER_03]: It has, was it established in prior movies that Godzilla has this regenerative power?
1:22:11
[SPEAKER_03]: In some of them at least, yes.
1:22:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, because they set that up really early on in this movie when he gets shot in the head.
1:22:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
1:22:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And he goes, yeah, because cheek, like basically it explodes but then grows immediately back.
1:22:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, right.
1:22:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And creating an indestructible force.
1:22:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that is a pointed as well in Shin Godzilla, which, again, totally different timeline and whatever.
1:22:34
[SPEAKER_02]: But the fact that Godzilla can do this is established in some previous movies, yes.
1:22:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And this goes in one of the themes then, too, is that once, once unleashed these forces are never controllable or never containerable, we can't put the toothpaste back into the two.
1:22:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and conventional weapons are not going to destroy it because it can just heal itself.
1:22:55
[SPEAKER_02]: You have to come up with some sort of gossily to plot.
1:22:59
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to mark Watney here to science the shit out of this again.
1:23:03
[SPEAKER_03]: But then we know from 1954, is that
1:23:07
[SPEAKER_03]: There's social commentary there, which is, you guys aren't trustable.
1:23:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, just because you make this new thing to defeat this one thing, now we have a problem solution mass.
1:23:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Problem, we get solution, which we get it's problem, which we get solution.
1:23:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And so once it's out, once we can't ever put back the knowledge of splitting the atom.
1:23:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, right.
1:23:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And unless we return to, you know, our
1:23:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Although I do every once in a while when I get a little too much on there, I try to put it back in a little bit.
1:23:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So.
1:23:40
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, so yeah, so it's a big theme, big interesting theme of of living with guilt.
1:23:49
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you how do you repair trauma?
1:23:52
[SPEAKER_03]: How do you forgive people?
1:23:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And how do you pick up after this really, you know, things that you did or didn't do?
1:23:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's it's an interesting argument because.
1:24:04
[SPEAKER_03]: with Shixima, he arguably Godzilla would not have been defeated, had he completed his Kamakaze mission, right?
1:24:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Right, there's an argument there that you can't ever solve, like old somebody else would have.
1:24:24
[SPEAKER_03]: But he was the guy who in that moment knew how to do the thing that they needed to do, which was to fly this weird experimental plane.
1:24:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's one of the things that didn't work for me in this movie is that Godzilla is, oh, look at this little plane.
1:24:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to go chase it and go out into the bag and like stop around, like it's a, I don't go chasing mosquitoes around
1:24:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, that was a little thing of honor to me about the movie.
1:24:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, a little bit contrived in the plan.
1:24:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, but no, I think that's a very valuable point and the idea, you know, going back to what we're talking about with 54 and the idea of sacrifice, right?
1:25:03
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and the sacrifice mean and when is it?
1:25:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, purposeful.
1:25:09
[SPEAKER_02]: And when is it like one of the themes that I catch through the whole movie and I'm going to mention him because I just love him.
1:25:16
[SPEAKER_02]: The Captain of the Mind Sweepersh boat that Shikashiman is on as a man named Akitsu.
1:25:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And he is just the stereotypical old blue collar, you know, had obviously been in the Navy during the war.
1:25:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's always trying in whenever something, you know, the government doesn't do something or makes, you know, a choice to try to like control information.
1:25:45
[SPEAKER_02]: He's always got a comment about how this country never changes.
1:25:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Information control is the only thing this country is good at and the leaders failed us and all this stuff.
1:25:55
[SPEAKER_02]: the voice of that frustration, um, but the ship that are the boat, I keep saying ship, the boat that he's on because it's this tiny little wooden thing, the name of it is the Shinsei motto, which is the new life, it's like the SS new life.
1:26:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, and so it is, you know,
1:26:25
[SPEAKER_02]: and the idea of how they expected us to make sacrifices.
1:26:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And we were always the ones called upon it.
1:26:31
[SPEAKER_02]: It was never them.
1:26:33
[SPEAKER_02]: We had to do these things.
1:26:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that ties into for me with this whole idea of survivor skills and the idea, the question of sacrifice and when is it worth it?
1:26:45
[SPEAKER_02]: it's all about new life.
1:26:47
[SPEAKER_02]: It's all about moving forward.
1:26:48
[SPEAKER_02]: It's all about forgetting that past and doing what you can do to survive and help others survive now.
1:26:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And I really like that aspect of it.
1:27:00
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not, there's a point where they're discussing with the veterans group and they're like, are we going to do anything or not?
1:27:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And somebody makes a point.
1:27:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I forget whether it's,
1:27:13
[SPEAKER_02]: where they say, you know, this isn't the unwinnable war that we lost against the Americans.
1:27:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Where we were put, it wasn't us, the grunts, the soldiers, the sailors, doing the work.
1:27:27
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the politicians, it was the leadership that put us in our unwinnable war and forced us to sacrifice ourselves for no reason.
1:27:36
[SPEAKER_02]: But this isn't that, this is something that we can win.
1:27:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And if we win than we can save Japan, unlike we were, you know, the war, it would be good for it.
1:27:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is a very strong stream through the whole movie.
1:27:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is another clip from Ayesha's podcast with Yuki Miyamoto talking about the theme of minus one.
1:27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it clearly shows that the things changed, because the big theme of the Godzilla minus one is that you have to live, you cannot self-sacrifice, and I think that theme is that message was very strong and very right there, and especially, you know, in the
1:28:23
[SPEAKER_00]: became an English word, which is walking so hard until you collapse, you die, you work, to die, death.
1:28:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think recently, that was severely criticized and people started thinking that, well, you know, you cannot self-sacrifice.
1:28:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that message in Godzilla minus one is a huge change.
1:28:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm curious if that resonates with you at all and what we were talking about in terms of sacrifice and working hard and all of that kind of stuff and just Japanese work culture.
1:29:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it absolutely does, and this is something that, you know, I tell my students to that a movie when you watch it for historical interpretation and stuff is not only about the time that it is portraying, but it's about the time when it's being made.
1:29:21
[SPEAKER_02]: It's because it's mean made with
1:29:24
[SPEAKER_02]: sensibilities and themes and ideas of its time of creation, right?
1:29:30
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think this is an important point that Professor Miyamoto brings up because it is talking about not sacrificing yourself and she's right.
1:29:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Through the 80s and into the early 90s, we had this kind of image of Japan as, you know, the working to death, the dedication to the company,
1:29:50
[SPEAKER_02]: the idea that the Japanese, you know, never went home, that they were always working, that it was, you know, you instead of sacrificing your life for the Emperor, now you were sacrificing your time and your energy and your mental well-being for the company, right?
1:30:04
[SPEAKER_02]: You're a corporate fuel lord.
1:30:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, yes, in order to, and there's a history that goes to this because it was part of the reconstruction after the devastation of the war rebuilding the Japanese economy and then going into like the 70s and 80s, the explosion of the Japanese economy into becoming, you know, second only to the US in the world.
1:30:25
[SPEAKER_02]: with the downturn of the economy in the 1990s and the recession that Japan still really hasn't escaped since then.
1:30:34
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people questioned the whole idea of sacrificing yourself to the company and is especially since the 2000s and 2010s and now into the 2000s and 20s, things like
1:30:49
[SPEAKER_02]: remaining with the same company for your entire lifetime, are no longer as cherished ideals with, you know, within Japanese corporate culture, you know, people move corporations now, people move jobs now, people refuse to or change jobs if they feel that they're not getting enough personal time to spend with their families and so forth.
1:31:10
[SPEAKER_02]: So I do think that on a different level from what we were talking about the very heavy things of war sacrifice and stuff like that,
1:31:18
[SPEAKER_02]: It does resonate with this time in the the current Japanese mentality of why should I kill myself for the company so that stockholders can get a little bit more from their returns or whatever and the fact that hey, you know, we do need to step back and kind of have a bit more of a work life balance and and so for this is, you know, obviously.
1:31:44
[SPEAKER_02]: a different realm when we're bringing in radioactive lizards into it, but this does resonate, I think, very well with a contemporary audience.
1:31:54
[SPEAKER_03]: and it's collective action, this isn't the government doing this, this is a kind of a bottom-up grass roots effort that the government turns a blind eye to and says, okay, we're going to give you some ships that are, you know, don't have any guns on them anymore.
1:32:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And good luck and let us know how goes, which is also an interesting commentary about collective action and community driven goals.
1:32:17
[SPEAKER_03]: and then when those guys in that meeting say I don't want to do this I want to go be I need to go be with my family or you know I'm I need to make a different choice nobody thinks a bad thought about those people that decide to leave absolutely you we get it
1:32:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
1:32:36
[SPEAKER_02]: You got to be in this fight completely because everybody's already been through a fight exactly and they totally understand when the guy next to him is like, you know what I can't I can't I need to go protect my family because they didn't get those options before.
1:32:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's choice.
1:32:54
[SPEAKER_03]: It's about having agency and choice.
1:32:57
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're not going to judge you if you don't want to volunteer for this, what is probably a suicide mission.
1:33:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's an element of reclaiming Japan's masculinity afterwards, if we want to bring gender into this, which of course, we should.
1:33:12
[SPEAKER_02]: These are men who were on the losing side of a war and then are being occupied by a foreign power lost to,
1:33:21
[SPEAKER_02]: the masculine.
1:33:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's an amasculation that happens after World War II.
1:33:25
[SPEAKER_02]: We won't go too deep into it.
1:33:27
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know, by being given the chance to redeem themselves, even if they don't think that they were the problem in the war, right?
1:33:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Like they're they're clearly blaming
1:33:38
[SPEAKER_02]: the politicians and the leadership that made stupid decisions, this gives them a chance to reclaim that agency, that masculinity, in a way that isn't this useless sacrifice that they were forced into during the wartime period.
1:33:54
[SPEAKER_03]: in a brutal sacrifice that had consequences on all sides.
1:34:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Because if you had any hesitation, that's it, right?
1:34:05
[SPEAKER_03]: You are subject uponishment by the military establishment.
1:34:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, and as we read, so this week my students were reading
1:34:16
[SPEAKER_02]: accounts out of an oral history called Japan at War by a Theodore and how to go cook.
1:34:24
[SPEAKER_02]: It was written in the early 1990s or just compiled in early 1990s to great book, highly recommend it to anybody who wants to read about Japanese experiences of the war, the average Japanese person, whether they were civilian or a soldier or whatever.
1:34:40
[SPEAKER_02]: But so often people have their individual experiences that they don't get any control over and this gives them that control, that gives them the ability.
1:34:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And for some of them, it probably gave them the ability to do something that they felt was good when after the war they feel that what they did was bad.
1:34:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Right, you know, at the time, maybe they thought that they were doing a good thing, but then afterwards they realized, oh no,
1:35:06
[SPEAKER_02]: I was involved in, I mean, maybe it was, they were even involved in more crimes, you know, you don't know.
1:35:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:35:11
[SPEAKER_03]: So, um, but it's, I'm, I'm in the middle of watching the Vietnam War doc, Ken Burns Vietnam War documentary with my daughter.
1:35:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this idea that you take these young, mostly men who are just sort of ever, and you put them into these extra ordinary situations, and they're pushed and pushed and the incentive structures, especially in the Vietnam War, you know, around how do we, since there's no front line, so it's not about territory, it's about body count.
1:35:43
[SPEAKER_03]: The incentives are driven really weird.
1:35:46
[SPEAKER_03]: you then are in this environment where you are either pushed or led and then you go along with it to enact horrible things against human beings.
1:35:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And then when you if you're lucky to survive and you come home, you have that.
1:36:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Not only did you have maybe, and then there's the whole thing of survival skill regardless of that.
1:36:09
[SPEAKER_03]: On the other side of that is what I did in the war or in many ways
1:36:16
[SPEAKER_02]: the American experience in the Vietnam War in that in that exact manner is comparable to the Japanese experience in China where you're occupying force, who is having difficulty sorting
1:36:38
[SPEAKER_02]: In other cases, maybe you wouldn't, and I am not trying to excuse anything that's done by other Americans in Vietnam or Japanese in China, but you can see kind of the reasoning where that comes about.
1:36:55
[SPEAKER_02]: And as horrible as it is, you know, people come back and they have these memories and they try to suppress these memories.
1:37:02
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, the movie shows us a way that they can redeem themselves potentially.
1:37:07
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think we talk about this.
1:37:10
[SPEAKER_03]: new or concept of moral injury.
1:37:11
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not a new, the word moral injury is, I think, something that we're using more, just like PTSD and trauma and trauma-informed realization, all these kinds of things, we had shell shock back in, you know, earlier times.
1:37:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So this idea that there's a moral injury that's done to you by doing and participating in these acts of monstrosity,
1:37:39
[SPEAKER_03]: when you were just caught up as one small part.
1:37:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Like when you think about the World War II efforting, you think about the United States fighting a war on two fronts.
1:37:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Like it was a national effort.
1:37:53
[SPEAKER_03]: The entire country was involved either, you know, at some level shape or form, you were not unaffected by.
1:38:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
1:38:03
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an incredible amount of infrastructure
1:38:09
[SPEAKER_03]: and capital that's involved, and so there's no wonder that the United States wanted to create a regional, you know, a security apparatus that would avoid that happen ever again.
1:38:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
1:38:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So, um,
1:38:24
[SPEAKER_02]: anything else on your themes list here that you we've talked about a bunch of yeah no i think i think for all the themes i do want to mention a couple of things you mentioned that the the kind of the the plan and the way that godzilla was chasing she could even aircraft did it work for you i'm gonna mention a couple of things yeah um
1:38:42
[SPEAKER_02]: And number one, to stick with that, Shikishima in the movie is a good enough pilot to be entrusted with this experimental fighter plane and do all these complex maneuvers to distract Godzilla and get him to go to the place for the plan, but he's a natural pilot.
1:39:00
[SPEAKER_03]: And reality is getting into any old plan and fly it.
1:39:04
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... kamikaze pilots were some of the worst trained because they were you know as i told my students and all this time and effort training that exactly you only have to train them to take off you don't have to train them to land
1:39:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so typically they were, they were drafties who were given minimal training in order to get them up into the sky and points in towards a ship.
1:39:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so that's something that kind of bothered me, you know, just on a factual level.
1:39:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, but my biggest complaint is, and I know why they do it for the story.
1:39:37
[SPEAKER_02]: But the idea that the US is not going to do anything when there's a giant radioactive monster attacking Tokyo during the US occupation of Japan.
1:39:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And here's where literally using a his breath weapon, detonates a atomic bomb like, you know, explosion.
1:39:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, that is the atomic bomb that's on the other end of his breath weapon.
1:40:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So we mentioned that Godzilla in one of his attacks is going through the Ginsa District of Tokyo, and that's where notical works and whatever.
1:40:11
[SPEAKER_02]: So I did a little looking and by by looking and research,
1:40:17
[SPEAKER_02]: and calculated the distance.
1:40:20
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a 12 minute walk from Ginsa, Central Ginsa, to the building that was MacArthur's headquarters.
1:40:30
[SPEAKER_02]: This is during the time that MacArthur would have been very much in command of the Allied forces occupying Japan, and so they're right there.
1:40:42
[SPEAKER_02]: You can tell me that the US has 400,000 troops in Japan as an occupying force.
1:40:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And there we go.
1:41:00
[SPEAKER_02]: MacArthur's headquarters, and they just given four beat up old, uh, yeah, there's a frigates or, you know, there's a little, like I again, I get why they do it for the narrative.
1:41:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, this is the story and whatever, but that's just weak.
1:41:15
[SPEAKER_02]: I, I had a real problem with with that part of it.
1:41:17
[SPEAKER_03]: What do you think about the replacement for the oxygen destroyer by surrounding him with these gas cylinders?
1:41:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my gosh, that was just so it was like, okay, so they're going to sink him down to the bottom of the bay and hope the pressure kills him when he's a monster that came from the bottom of the ocean.
1:41:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Yep.
1:41:35
[SPEAKER_02]: And then they're going to raise him up quickly and basically get him the bends.
1:41:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:41:40
[SPEAKER_02]: That's supposed to, again.
1:41:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey, it's a story, it's fiction.
1:41:46
[SPEAKER_02]: We're talking about a giant radio act of monster here, so I'm not gonna be too like picky about details, but come on guys, you could put a little bit more thought into that.
1:41:57
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I was bumping up against some of this stuff as well.
1:42:00
[SPEAKER_03]: So because again, I wasn't calibrated for what the subtext of the movie was about, but I was just like, yeah, anyway, yeah.
1:42:09
[SPEAKER_03]: So good points.
1:42:11
[SPEAKER_03]: What else?
1:42:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Shall we talk just briefly about the movie that's coming?
1:42:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, mine is zero.
1:42:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's take another quick break and then we'll come back.
1:42:21
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll do that.
1:42:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're back.
1:42:30
[SPEAKER_03]: So now we're going to talk a little bit about minus zero, which will be out in a couple of weeks relative to when this is being recorded.
1:42:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Interestingly, I didn't realize this until I was watching the trailer today.
1:42:41
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the first IMAX movie for the Japanese market or what's the what's the deal there.
1:42:57
[SPEAKER_02]: any Japanese movie that was shot entirely with the idea of IMAX, right?
1:43:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I think I read somewhere that the movie itself is not 100% shot for IMAX.
1:43:12
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's a normal thing that they do, yeah, it's a, most things are blended, but but it is shot with the intention of it being an IMAX film, right, and to be released in IMAX in Japan, I think as what I'm understanding, but I don't know, do they, do they have IMAX theaters already in Japan, they do they do.
1:43:35
[SPEAKER_02]: The matter of fact, well, I mean, I'm not going to go see it in Japan, but I do have my tickets for IMAX on November 5th, which is technically a day early before the main release on the 6th.
1:43:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And my question is just that I don't know enough about IMAX, how widespread the technology is outside of the United States.
1:43:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what other, where other IMAX theaters are, how right, prevalent is the technology.
1:44:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, again, release, uh, you know, week of November 5th or 6th, depending on your location.
1:44:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Same director and writer, Takashi Yamazaki.
1:44:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Nice much annuity.
1:44:15
[SPEAKER_02]: Much of the same cast.
1:44:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
1:44:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have the characters.
1:44:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll go by the character names.
1:44:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Nodiko Shikishima, uh, Nota, the professor, Hizashima, the shipboat crewman, uh, Akiko is actually played by the same little girl who was doing it in 2023.
1:44:33
[SPEAKER_02]: He's just, you know, a little bit older.
1:44:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So playing the aged up grow.
1:44:37
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, all those characters will be the same.
1:44:40
[SPEAKER_02]: But the new cast member that I wanted to make sure that I pointed out is Jun Kunimura is playing Dr. Ogata.
1:44:49
[SPEAKER_02]: who apparently treated is the one who treated Nortico when she was injured in the in the blast.
1:44:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
1:44:57
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a scene in the trailer where he says that she should not have survived, which kind of give, do vibes to it.
1:45:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
1:45:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But I point out Junkuni Muda because not only is he a very prolific actor, he's been in things that our audience will probably know because he was in
1:45:15
[SPEAKER_02]: He played Kato, the former war criminal, who starts a dating relationship with Sunja in season two.
1:45:24
[SPEAKER_02]: He's been in tons of U.S. Hong Kong and Korean movies as well as Japanese ones, and he won't be playing a new role in the upcoming Shogun season two.
1:45:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, but as a character named Goda, I have no idea what that entails, but I'm interested to see what it entails, but he's been in everything from black grain, each of the killer, kill bill volumes, one at two, several Godzilla movies to include, Shin Godzilla that I've talked about, the 2019 Midway, great word of our comedies.
1:45:58
[SPEAKER_02]: So he's been in a lot of things and a lot of things that American audiences would have
1:46:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm excited to see what kind of role this doctor or got us fills in the movie.
1:46:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Cool.
1:46:10
[SPEAKER_02]: As you mentioned, there are several trailers available on the internet, whether it's YouTube or INDB, has them, and do we want to kind of go into observations from the trailers, maybe?
1:46:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, so just we don't have any insider knowledge where we just watched the trailers and and what we got is what we got looks like we got a much bigger monster this time around it would seem so he's he's he's back and and bigger and better than ever.
1:46:40
[SPEAKER_02]: clearly states that it takes place two years after the events of minus one, right?
1:46:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Shikashima and Noriko now appear to be married with Akiko as their adopted daughter.
1:46:52
[SPEAKER_02]: And she has the iPad.
1:46:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes.
1:46:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Noriko has the iPad.
1:46:57
[SPEAKER_02]: instead of the mad scientist.
1:46:59
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a few phrases going through the different trailers that allude to discussions of moral boundaries that mankind should not cross.
1:47:11
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a line in one of the trailers that
1:47:16
[SPEAKER_02]: weapons that require a sacrifice, which, you know, we don't know obviously what it's referring to, but the fact that Shikishima is a former Kamakaze pilot is potentially foreshadowing something.
1:47:37
[SPEAKER_02]: you had referred to in the idea of Godzilla as punishment in retribution and retribution in our previous podcast and we talked about the idea of the Tatari Gami, right?
1:47:50
[SPEAKER_02]: The spirit of the dead that comes back to punish the living for crimes.
1:47:56
[SPEAKER_02]: There's another tagline returning to zero is not an option.
1:48:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So kind of ambiguous is to what that might be referring to given them the movie's title is zero, but maybe it's that, you know, you can't get it back to a level state toothpaste can't go back in something like that.
1:48:14
[SPEAKER_02]: I found it interesting.
1:48:15
[SPEAKER_02]: There's one teaser that begins with English lines, we hear like a radio operator somebody saying, if their operation fails, maybe we'll finally get to use it.
1:48:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Hmm.
1:48:25
[SPEAKER_02]: What could that be?
1:48:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And then later on in that same trailer, there's a board third drop for Pete, a board third drop.
1:48:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
1:48:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So clearly, somebody speaking American English is involved in things.
1:48:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Do the Americans finally get involved?
1:48:41
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't know.
1:48:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Is there something else involved?
1:48:44
[SPEAKER_02]: So I was going to get to that last?
1:48:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
1:48:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Sorry.
1:48:48
[SPEAKER_03]: I was running ahead because there was something.
1:48:53
[SPEAKER_03]: In the trailers, they were like, wait, is there something else going on here beyond?
1:48:59
[SPEAKER_03]: So, so don't listen if you absolutely want no spoilers.
1:49:03
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they're the end of you from here on out in the background.
1:49:05
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't really do much else.
1:49:07
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a place where Godzilla's walking past the statue of liberty, and then we hear something in one of them.
1:49:14
[SPEAKER_02]: This isn't Godzilla we're talking about.
1:49:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's what I think caught me there's an and then if you listen closely, we right after that you hear a roar, but it's not Godzilla's roar.
1:49:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, missed that.
1:49:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And so, and in one of the teasers, there's something that says a new threat approaches.
1:49:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, if we were talking about Godzilla wouldn't be a new threat, it would be an old threat.
1:49:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So what's going on?
1:49:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Again, spoiler, spoiler, spoiler, spoiler.
1:49:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Please go ahead if you want to absolutely know spoilers.
1:49:42
[SPEAKER_02]: But for those of you who don't care or want it, I have seen chatter and I have not gone to confirm it because I am intentionally avoiding it, right?
1:49:51
[SPEAKER_02]: But I've seen chatter that maybe King Giddara shows up who is another monster, the Godzilla monster reverse.
1:49:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, right?
1:49:58
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's
1:50:22
[SPEAKER_03]: everybody, future editor David here.
1:50:25
[SPEAKER_03]: So the conversation ends a little short there.
1:50:27
[SPEAKER_03]: We had a technical issue in the recording, but we were functionally done, so there's not much else to say.
1:50:33
[SPEAKER_03]: So great conversation with Nate had a lot of fun with that.
1:50:36
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm a little late getting the editing on this episode done, so it's coming out today, which is right around the release time for minus zero.
1:50:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Nate and I both have plans to see the movie in the next few days.
1:50:48
[SPEAKER_03]: And then sometime next week, we will get our minus zero movie review out to everyone.
1:50:55
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll just sort of do a standard lorehounds one shot on that.
1:50:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Alright, well thanks for hanging out for our Godzilla coverage.
1:51:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Remember, we have a whole channel set up on the Discord called Monster Island for everything related.
1:51:09
[SPEAKER_03]: Looks like we have some Monsterverse news as well for the Apple TV show.
1:51:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Sounds like they're getting that show back on track.
1:51:18
[SPEAKER_03]: great shows coming out of Apple with their version of the property.
1:51:23
[SPEAKER_03]: In the meantime, I just want to give a quick shout out to all of the various community members and podcast supporters who without their help none of this would be possible.
1:51:33
[SPEAKER_03]: So real quick to our community volunteers, hand to the pod, Nancy, master of the polls, captain of the poll here on Peter O. H. Keeper of the show tracker, sub-zero,
1:51:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Lorberry in Brian E. D. 63 and discord moderators Brian E. D. 63 and K. and Adrienne.
1:51:50
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1:51:54
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1:52:00
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1:52:08
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1:52:54
[SPEAKER_03]: and Adrienne.
1:52:55
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1:52:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Thanks to everyone who listens and we'll see you on the next podcast.
1:53:25
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1:53:28
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1:53:34
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1:53:40
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1:53:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening.