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'A film that only Japan could have made': Seventy years on, why Godzilla is the darkest monster movie of them all

Ishirō Honda's momentous 1954 monster film was born out of a national tragedy in Japan. It has a bleak message for humanity that goes beyond cinematic spectacle.

The message is that the arms race is never-ending, there's always going to be a bigger threat around the corner, we're always facing our own annihilation, and it will be at our own hands – Steven SlossThe film-makers had wanted to imitate the exquisite stop-motion animation that Willis H O'Brien had created for King Kong, but Tsuburaya didn't have the time or the budget required, hence Godzilla is played by Haruo Nakajima in a rubber suit with pudgy legs and wobbly dorsal fins. One of its main characters is Dr Yamane (Takashi Shimura, the co-star of such Kurosawa classics as Rashomon and Seven Samurai), a palaeontologist who is shown sitting in darkness, dismayed at the prospect of such a miraculous "biophysical specimen" being killed rather than studied. Another character is an eye-patched rogue scientist, Dr Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), who has synthesised a substance he calls the "oxygen destroyer", which can reduce marine life to skeletons in seconds when it is introduced to water.

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