It’s my personal favorite, and the only one in which it’s entirely reasonable to get a little emo. If you can only make it to one of these screenings but still want your Godzilla worldview to be rocked, this is the one to see. Destoroyah dials it back on the body horror, but instead goes all-in on the sense of Greek tragedy that underlies most of the Heisei movies. (Just go with it, it’s Godzilla logic.) The confrontations with Biollante are a bloodbath compared to the 60s and 70s fight scenes, with green goop flying in all directions and, at one point, Godzilla literally being given stigmata by Biollante’s tendrils, which all end in tiny mouths with tiny razor-sharp teeth. These monsters sweat and bleed, and when our favorite lizard opens his mouth, you can literally see the strands of drool glisten.īiollante, the antagonist of the first film, is as genuinely frightening as the franchise ever got: like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors filtered through John Carpenter’s The Thing, it’s a many-toothed marvel of science genetically engineered from a rose, Godzilla’s DNA, and the spirit of the lead scientist’s recently deceased daughter. Destoroyah on Tuesday the 25th, are the undeniable peaks of this era, and any viewers who are only familiar with Godzilla’s earlier work are likely to be shocked by how much of a physical transformation he and the franchise as a whole have taken on. Biollante on Monday, July 24, and Godzilla vs. The first two screenings of the series, Godzilla vs. Rife explains, “What I like about this era is the way it approaches the material, which can be a little exaggerated and silly. The next 15 years of films, known collectively as the Heisei era of the franchise, as it more or less aligns chronologically with Japan’s Heisei imperial period, would strip away the tongue-in-cheek approach that defined many of the sequels in favor of heightened melodrama and surprising brutality. But this monster contains multitudes, and as he entered his 30s, a milestone at which most men decide to get into post-rock and recenter their identity around either a baseball team or a dive bar near their apartment, Godzilla returned to his roots as dark, brooding, and, for the first time in decades, scary. I grew up watching these sillier kaiju movies-kaiju being the name of this genre of Japanese monster movies, as well as the name for the city-flattening monsters featured in them-until the VHS cassettes wore out, and they hold a special place in my heart.
Robert Oppenheimer.) Sometime shortly after he squared up against King Kong in 1962, Godzilla shed some of that metaphorical subtext to adopt a more cartoonish persona that snowballed with each successive movie, and by the late 60s this grim personification of nuclear holocaust had become the unlikely star of what were essentially (delightful!) children’s movies in which he played beach volleyball with a giant crab and suplexed his fellow monsters, Hulk Hogan-style. In his original 1954 incarnation, Godzilla was a direct response to the bombing of Hiroshima, a towering physical manifestation of nature’s revenge on humanity for having the gall to create world-destroying weapons.
But what if I were to tell you there’s more to this monster than Ping-Pong ball eyes and clunky latex-suited melee? This July, as Oppenheimer fever is rapidly spreading across the moviegoing public, the Music Box Theatre and Chicago film critic and programmer Katie Rife are showing several different sides of Godzilla with four screenings of his later, lesser-seen classics, playing at sundown in the Music Box Garden every night from July 24-27. He’s probably breathing fire, definitely rubbery, maybe toppling a Tokyo skyscraper like a Jenga tower. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & RecreationĬlose your eyes.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.
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