Godzilla has forgotten his horror, but Chernobyl largely compensates

Over the decades, Godzilla has been a large number of people: City Destroyer, Lead Earth Defender, Avengers villain and Charles Barkley's basketball rival. But it all started with the atomic bomb.

There would be no Godzilla without the horror of radiation. It is curious that Kaiju's most iconic legacy continues in two very different ways last weekend. There are legendary images Godzilla: the king of monsters, of course, and then there is the final of the series Chernobyl. The HBO miniseries do not contain giant monsters spilling buildings, but treat nuclear energy as the same kind of almighty monster that seemed to be Godzilla when he came out of Tokyo Bay.

But we have to go back a little bit before these two very different elements of pop culture begin to connect meaningfully.

Godzilla used to talk about fear and not chills

The original 1954 Godzilla movie is a horror film, released less than ten years after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and largely bombed Tokyo. Godzilla was a traveling metaphor of the consequences of nuclear terror.

Watching the movie can be a sobering experience for genre fans who are more familiar with Godzilla's brawling fights, or even with the American release of the original movie, which adds Raymond Burr to the plot and cuts many of the more allusions obvious to atomic bombs.

It is helpful to review the original version to see how the original intentions of the film differed from the way we understood the character's tone.

Godzilla He briefly looks at a mother and her three children in tears as Godzilla burns Tokyo, spewing atomic breath and reducing the rubble on civilians in panic. Weeping, the mother tries to comfort her children with the assurance that they will soon join their father. The implication being that he died in a previous bombing.

There are crowded hospital scenes full of dead and dying, and a Geiger counter creaks wildly when he rubs against a confused and irradiated little girl after Godzilla returns to the sea. The villagers who have survived the first arrival of Godzilla are asked to move away from dangerously irradiated footprints and to be informed that they can no longer use one of the wells on the island for fear of radiation poisoning. The skin of the monster is modeled on the burns and scars caused by radiation.

But all the hints do not refer to the old wounds of the Second World War, as there were more recent nuclear fears to be dramatized. The film begins with an invisible Godzilla flowing and radiating several ships, and the few sailors who survived the initial attack perish shortly after being washed ashore.

In 1954, only a few months before Godzilla At the premiere, a tuna boat called the Daigo Fukuryu Maru ("Lucky Dragon No. 5") was caught in the aftermath of an American nuclear bombing bomb near Atoll Bikini. White-gray ash from the scorched remains of a destroyed coral reef rained down on the fishermen, who returned home while they were suffering from the symptoms of radiation sickness. A sailor, Aikichi Kuboyama, the chief radioman of the boat, has died.

Japan's fear of nuclear energy was new at the end of the film, that is to say it was not unfounded.

"At the time, I think that there was an ability to grasp a thing of absolute terror," GodzillaThe director, Ishiro Honda, recalled in an interview with G-Fan magazine in 1991 about the influence of the atomic bomb on the film. "When I came back from the war and went through Hiroshima, there was a heavy atmosphere – a fear that the Earth is already coming to an end. It was my base. "

The real horror of Chernobyl

Chernobyldramatization of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine then under the Soviet era, feels just as apocalyptic. Without being able to resort to monstrous metaphors – or perhaps lightened by them -, the HBO miniseries is a brutal and flawless look at the horrors of nuclear energy that have slipped.

People survive the initial explosion of the reactor and are apparently unharmed, but their flesh becomes black and liquefies due to the absorption of massive doses of radiation. A pregnant woman kisses her husband, unaware that the radiation that will soon kill him will also kill their unborn child. Young conscripts draw a litter of puppies to try to prevent the spread of radiation, if the animals roam freely.

Governmental and military authorities are struggling to understand a gigantic, perhaps unstoppable problem, and many civilians are being evacuated from the vicinity of the reactor body. The villain here, the radiation, is so small that it is invisible. Yet it is everywhere, more subtle and insidious than any heavy monster.

Although Chernobyl This is historical fiction rather than science fiction, and it is an accident rather than a war, the subject and the dark nature of the series raise many fears Godzilla done in his best moments. But even the original Godzilla, despite all its representations of metaphorical nuclear death, can not compete with the graphic nature of Chernobyl.

He should not be able to either. Chernobyl is the prestige television in 2019, while Godzilla was a mid-50s blockbuster from a studio that needed (and got) a big win at the box office. Godzilla manages to resonate and entertain, a delicate balance that the franchise would lose almost instantly.

The first era of the Godzilla films, which lasted until 1975, quickly abandoned the nuclear metaphor. Godzilla was only a monster in the aftermath, then the greatest defender of the Earth, as he fought incessantly against more and more ridiculous enemies. The model buildings knocked down during these fights looked like and were empty props. The human cost of all these destructions was no longer the goal of the series.

The only real exception to this evolution is that of 1971. Godzilla against Hedorah, a weird and surprisingly graphic anti-pollution parable, although the smog-carrying monster is made of toxic and non-nuclear waste.

Whatever the number of rads in the series (which would sometimes come back on his fear of nuclear), the issue often seems more silly than existential.

Godzilla's films in the '80s and' 90s revived some of the original themes of the series' nuclear terror, but radiation often ended up being a conspiracy device, rather than actual horror. The Legendary Pictures series continues this trend.

Even though the 2014 film Godzilla begins with the destruction of a nuclear power plant that appears ChernobylAs on the surface, the monsters eventually absorb all the radiation, canceling the threat. In King of monsters, Humanity uses the nuclear weapon to propel Godzilla, so that radiation eventually saves the day. All the disadvantages of this fusion of monsters are neglected.

The Godzilla franchise quickly made radiation a show rather than a permanent source of horror, a trap that Chernobyl avoid carefully during his five episodes. It's a mini-series based on historical events, which means there's no need to launch a franchise or turn to pure entertainment to keep the attention of its viewers.

Godzilla's first film seriously addressed the fear of nuclear war by turning an invisible fear into a beast whose shape dominates skyscrapers, while Chernobyl takes a more direct approach. He is able to attack the surreal nature of radiation by describing and showing its dangers and effects. Both works of art serve as a warning, even if they exist more than 70 years apart and serve these messages in very different ways.

Godzilla gave birth to the bomb and its fallout, both literal and metaphorical, even though the monster king has managed to pass off as a true summer blockbuster. It's very good. While saving the world from an alien invader with three heads, Chernobyl can calmly serve as a reminder of the very real and very frightening forces that gave Godzilla the first meaning.

The half-life of radioactive material can be counted in tens of thousands of years; Pop culture still has the time and opportunity to continue to find ways to understand the terrifying potential of splitting the atom.