"Countless stranger things": Rodan

 

Info
Also Known As: Radon, Great Monster of the Skies (Japan); just plain Radon (Japan); Invasion 2034 (Belgium)
Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Kimura Takeshi and Murata Takeo, from a story by Kuronuma Ken. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Ifukube Akira.
Runtime: 82 minutes (Japan), 74 minutes (United States), 70 minutes (United States TV prints)
Release Date: December 26, 1956

What’s It About? (Note: significant spoilers here)
A remote mining community experiences strange accidents that culminate in disappearances and brutal murders. Prehistoric dragonfly larvae are discovered to be the cause, but a missing miner comes back with even worse news; the creatures that eat the insects have hatched from their eggs. Two Rodans, giant mutant Pteranodons (flying prehistoric reptiles), have been awoken by hydrogen bombs, and now they’re soaring around the skies of Japan at supersonic speeds! Also, unlike what Belgium seemed to think, the film is set roughly when it was made and not in the year 2034.

Monster Appearances: Rodan x2, Meganulon (the larvae)

Childhood Memories
I don’t remember if I went to Video Vault before my family moved to Reykjavik, Iceland in August 1999, but I suspect I may have; during the times Aunt Boopy and I went there during my visits back to the States, I recall it feeling like a familiar place. Either way, the experience was transfixing: here was my tiny young self, looking up at these towering white shelves full of videotape covers. Most of what Boopy and I needed on my visits home was on the bottom of the shelves, on the first floor, in the family section. 

The one real spoiled brat tantrum either of us recalled me throwing toward her, years later, happened in that spot. It must have been sometime during my visit in spring 2000, when she was offering me two Scooby-Doo tapes we could rent. One of them was the Hanna-Barbera’s Personal Favorites edition of the series, which featured Scooby as well as a bunch of other familiar cartoon characters on the back. As it turns out, none of the additional characters actually featured on the tape (they were only present to advertise the Personal Favorites line, each tape of which featured hand-picked episodes for the given series). But I was excited by the potential of a giant cartoon crossover at any rate. Boopy then suggested the tape of Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School, that case featured a bunch of unfamiliar characters on the back, plus Scrappy-Doo, who I already knew I didn’t like as much as the rarely-seen Scooby-Dum as far as Scooby’s cousins went. Having already had my heart set on the Personal Favorites and its misleading promise of a crossover, I guess I felt…threatened, by being offered an alternative? Anyway, I started bawling, for who knows what reason. Ironically, I think we ended up renting them both anyway. Perhaps as a form of karma, watching Ghoul School scared me. I haven’t actually revisited it since.

It wasn’t until I moved back to Alexandria, VA that Boopy and I visited the upstairs section, where the tapes we wanted were frequently beyond my reach. I think it was on the third and highest floor that the science-fiction and fantasy collection, including giant monster movies, was kept. Here was uncharted territory, because the upper floors were also where films for grown-ups were kept. Posters for B-movies like Eegah and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies hung framed on the wall, full of menacing horror movie imagery that promised a child-unfriendly experience. In amongst the ostensibly family-appropriate Godzilla tapes, who knows what ghoulish fare for adults lurked, full of gory violence or really bad words. That’s the ethos of kaiju movies in a nutshell: appealing to kids (or at least, kids with the patience to sit through all of the human scenes), but with a foot in the twin worlds of horror and adult concerns, areas I was both repulsed and fascinated by.

Video Vault was full of all these unknown worlds to enter, rows upon rows of colorful cases beckoning from the crisp white shelves, the ancient plastic coating on the older video boxes starting to crinkle and peel off. I didn’t discover Rodan there directly, but the trailer for it was among a huge amount of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi trailers included at the end of another Godzilla VHS that I watched around late 2002. (I forget which specific film was on that tape, but it included a trailer for King Kong vs. Godzilla as well, proving that the film did, in fact, exist; I’d heard of it but wasn’t sure if it was real or not.)
I’d had no idea there was a solo film for one of my favorite Godzilla monsters, but I became eager to see it. I probably found it on next week’s trip to Video Vault, hidden with the other R-titles in a lower shelf to the side of the sci-fi room, away from the wall in the center where the G-title Godzilla tapes could be found. Staying the night at Boopy’s place, I pop Rodan in the tape player, completely unprepared for what I am about to watch.

I knew Rodan’s deal. He was a giant pterosaur. So I wasn’t expecting the claustrophobic terror of the early sequence in the flooded mine. Two miners and a policeman on their way to investigate a death when they hear a bizarre noise as they wade chest-deep into the water. Then the miner in the middle starts screaming as something unseen pulls him below the water to his death. The policeman in front, cut off from escape, fires his gun into the water to no avail; he, too, is pulled down. (It turns out I had misremembered the scene even with subsequent viewings; in reality, the miner who’s pulled down is in front, and the policeman is in the middle, which makes more spatial sense.) The miner in the back manages to run to the elevator and pick up a phone for help. The unseen something making the noise comes after him, covering him in its shadow, and he screams before he is killed offscreen.

I’m freaked out; not the first nor the last time a kaiju film would do that to me, but I wasn’t expecting it, nor does the sense of violation of my safety as a viewer diminish when the unseen killers turn out to be rather goofy-looking insects. I was expecting a fun giant monster movie, not a human-sized horror story. Where’s Rodan? Why is the tone so dark? What the heck is going on?

When Rodan (who eats the insects) does turn up, I am delighted by the look of the monster and the scenes where he attacks the city and/or the military, though I’m disappointed by the lack of proper explosions when he flies over and destroys the jet fighters (having already seen him blow a plane up into a nice fireball in the later Destroy All Monsters). I’m baffled when a second Rodan shows up. Since when?? There’s only ever been one Rodan in every other appearance of the creature that I’ve come across. And of course, once again, I am sad and angry at the end: both of the Rodans die in a sea of lava following a human attack on their mountain home. So as with Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I don’t like the movie. I should have guessed that as a film introducing a monster, it would be one of the super-serious, downbeat ones that are no fun.

And yet, now, I look back on the time that Rodan scared seven-year-old me with fondness. There’s an adage that media critics seem to love - Elizabeth Sandifer deploys it often in her brilliant Doctor Who blog TARDIS Eruditorum - that the best media for children is the stuff that scars one for life. I don’t think that’s true in every case (I can’t recall any Looney Tunes short particularly scaring me as a child, even the spooky ones), but I think there’s a lot to the argument as it pertains to one’s tastes being shaped. Rodan was a trap, laid out on the shelf, waiting for me to spring it. It was manifestly not made for children, yet young weirdos like me who loved dinosaurs and giant monsters would flock to it anyway. And Video Vault, as a space, embodied that tension more perfectly than any other physical place I could name.

In 2003 or just after, Video Vault moved shop from the three story building on South Washington Street to a large basement property on South Columbus Street, just a block from the apartment building where my Grandma (Mom’s mom) lived until her move to a nursing home. I never liked the second store location quite as much, but in retrospect, the subterranean feel only added to the atmosphere of slight danger, of there being corners I shouldn’t visit, of being an explorer of the unknown. In my eyes, Blockbuster, with its slick chain-store veneer and smaller catalogue, just couldn’t compete with Video Vault, where populist classics were sorted not far away from the most bizarre, obscure crap you could imagine.

Of course, it was Video Vault that couldn’t compete in the second half of the decade. The rise of Netflix was swift but brutal. Its disc-mailing service and limited streaming options mean that the consumer didn’t actually have to haul themselves outside to pick up what they wanted to rent, nor would they have to call a store beforehand to see if they had a title or not, and in any case the rental period was much more lenient than the likes of Video Vault’s three-day rule. And of course, that was just the prelude to the rise of streaming, which completely upended the video rental market altogether.

Video Vault didn’t last long into the next decade, closing on (if memory serves) April 10th, 2010. We had several months' notice, during which time the store’s stock went on sale. My DVD copy of the original Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla is the same one I first rented from the store in 2005 or so. But the store itself wasn’t the only casualty. 

Before the store closed, my family had brought some home movies there for conversion from tape to DVD. These included the first movie I ever made: The T-Rex, shot in 2001 (I think) in my backyard in Iceland. Filmed by my father with narration by myself, The T-Rex told a story based on loosely-related vignettes involving a villainous Tyrannosaurus Rex up to no good and plot points inspired by various films or books that were on my mind. (Don’t worry, Tyrannosaur fans, I’m pretty sure there was a good T-Rex in it somewhere; whether the featured dinosaurs were good guys or bad guys depended on how I felt about the individual toys used in the production.) The short took the form of filmed shots of unmoving action figures set up around the yard, while six-year-old me explained what was happening. The main exception to the stillness of the action came during the final fight, when my dad set up a sparkler inside the jaws of a 1998 Hollywood Godzilla action figure to simulate the toy breathing fire. What we didn’t expect was that the effect would melt away the figure’s lower front teeth, but the loss was worth it for the shot.

I watched The T-Rex on the only VHS copy we had before we brought it in to Video Vault, refreshing my memory of it, and I’m so glad I did. On April 10 of 2010, I rode my scooter over to the rental store around an hour before closing time, only to find that the lights were off and the doors had closed early. The Video Vault website is still up, complete with an email address, but I’ve never heard back from the few emails I sent them over the last fifteen years. I recall Jane, a particularly cool employee there, saying she’d look after our tapes for me, and I think she meant it. But fifteen years is a long time, and one only has so much storage space for the baggage from a previous job. To all intents and purposes, part of my childhood quite literally disappeared with Video Vault.

There are many, many net positives to the existence of streaming services. Finding specific films is far easier than it was in a time when physical releases or rare screenings were one’s only hope of seeing them. In general, films being available online - legally and in certain gray areas of the internet - has been an equalizer, in most cases granting far wider accessibility to a great many titles. And there are the financial considerations in renting or purchasing a certain amount of Blu-Rays and DVDs each month, versus paying a single monthly fee for access to a streaming service’s entire library, or using a free service that runs on ads.

But this status quo sucks. The blandly smooth experience of scrolling through a streaming service’s homepage, receiving algorithmically-derived recommendations designed to remove the effort of finding something to watch, is a pathetic substitute for the active experience and mystery of a place like Video Vault. And that’s before one gets into the numerous problems that all of the prominent streaming services have demonstrated in practice, not least of which is that the corporate gatekeeping involved in what is kept available on streaming services has proven to counterbalance the advantage that online access was supposed to grant over physical releases (at least for those sticking within strictly legal means of viewing media). Maybe physical film media will see a resurgence as a popular
hobby in the same way that vinyl has, but there’s no guarantee.

I mourn places like Video Vault, not just for myself but for the children of today and tomorrow, who don’t have the option of experiencing an equivalent location for themselves. In a way, it’s an objectively strange thing to miss. The video rental store, so essential to my early film exposure, occupied such a brief sliver of total human history: only around three decades of cultural prominence from the late seventies to late noughties, and a rapidly dwindling number of old-school stragglers since. And plenty of children will grow up to look past the corporate streaming slop so readily available to them. They'll find cool, weird, and interesting film and television that inspires them and fires up their imaginations, just as so many did in the decades before home video even existed. But for such people, something like Video Vault could have been a huge boon in their lives. It certainly made mine that bit better. And it was the perfect location to discover films like Rodan.

Jane, or anyone else who worked at Video Vault: I’d love to get in touch. It would mean the world to get The T-Rex back if it’s still out there (which I doubt, but you never know). Either way, I’d still love to hear from you and reminisce about the coolest local video rental store a young film fan could have had. 

And hey, if there’s any film buffs reading this who want to try and track down a historically insignificant but sentimentally valuable lost film, I welcome any support. They found a lost sixties Doctor Who episode behind someone’s couch cushions, and another in the closet of a church basement. Like Hirata Akihiko’s scientist character says in Rodan, “Countless stranger things have happened in the world.”

Analysis
(Content warning: reference to suicide)

Rodan, Honda Ishiro’s first “proper” giant kaiju offering since Gojira, is not as strong as that film. It expresses its themes with less depth, and its characters are paper-thin in comparison. Crucially, in spite of its flaws, Rodan also manages to be quite good.

This was an important achievement. Replicating the emotional impact and pathos of Gojira in a production-line environment like Toho studios, let alone maintaining it, would have been a tough ask. Far more important was that the kaiju films find a reliable quality baseline to aim for, as a jumping-off point for creating any future masterpieces. Rodan succeeds at being a good movie, and even more significantly for the health of the kaiju films, its strengths are different from those of Gojira’s.

One of Rodan’s biggest successes is its tonal approach, namely that it is by and large creepier than Gojira. Though Rodan shares an explicit nuclear theme with the latter film, with nuclear tests being brought up as the likely reason that the monsters have awakened, the topic is otherwise left unexplored in any specific way. Instead, Rodan doubles down on another theme of Gojira, that there are dark, dangerous corners of the world which humanity knows nothing about, which the nuclear powers are opening up with their violations of the natural order. And in this case, it isn’t just nuclear weapons. In an eerily prescient moment, a group of miners at the beginning discuss climate change as a potential cause of the hot weather the town’s been having. I don’t know if Honda and crew intended the reference to be read as a consequence of human action, but the nineteen-fifties was the first decade where scientific concern about the climate impact of fossil fuel emissions became widespread, so the moment carries resonance either way.

In other words, Rodan goes even further than Gojira in incorporating a Lovecraftian influence, depicting a world where unseen horrors beyond human comprehension lurk at the edges, waiting to be disturbed. This is most clearly expressed in the portion of the film where Shigeru (played by Sahara Kenji, another significant Godzilla-series actor making his debut as a leading man) returns from a mine collapse with total amnesia, having witnessed something so horrible that his brain couldn’t process the sight. When his memory is eventually triggered by the sight of two bird eggs in a nest, he flashes back to being lost in the caverns beyond the mines, where he witnesses a whole swarm of the Meganulon as well as a giant egg. The Meganulon are an uncanny enough intrusion into the mining town’s world, but they pale before the Rodan that hatches from the egg, a giant reptile that snatches up the Meganulon like a bird snapping up maggots - because the fearsome Meganulon, that had so terrorized the village and seven-year-old me, are merely food for this much larger prehistoric beast. The slow zoom onto Shigeru’s frozen, terrified expression as he witnesses the baby Rodan feeding perfectly conveys that what he is seeing is something humans weren’t meant to comprehend. This even though the baby Rodan is in fact the most adorable and cuddly you could imagine such a creature looking, and my first reaction would have been “Awww, so cute! Please don’t eat me, I want to be your friend.”

Even before the Rodans are properly identified, their otherworldly menace is felt above the ground as well as below. At first, they appear merely as unidentified objects flying across the world (at mach one, then the cutting-edge speed for supersonic travel), snatching up cattle and humans as food, and striking down jet fighters that attempt to engage them. The sky is one area that the human race was only able to “dominate” in the twentieth century, and moving about it might as well be the ultimate display of power from a land-dweller’s perspective. To have the global airspace suddenly claimed by a more powerful presence reinforces the theme that humanity is out of its depth.

The eerie nature of the threat is further reinforced by, of all things, the switch to color from black and white. Rodan was not Toho’s first color film - the Shaw Brothers co-production Legend of the White Serpent having come out earlier in the year - but it was early enough for the use of color to have a major impact on the film’s style. Toyoda Shiro’s Legend of the White Serpent followed the trend of pioneering Japanese color films such as Kinoshita Keisuke’s Carmen Comes Home (1951) and Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Gate of Hell (1953), which emphasized the rich palette that Eastmancolor film allowed, while Warning from Space had used the contrast between the subdued tones of ordinary life and the rich hues of the space-borne apocalypse to good effect.

In contrast, Rodan serves up a world that looks like hell from the start. The color palette is dominated by browns of every form, present in the rock and dirt and mud that makes up the mountains and tunnels and caverns that surround the mining town. Even before any dead bodies or monsters make their appearance, even before nuclear weapons and climate change warrant a mention, the monochromatic, ill-lit mineshafts high up the mountain grant the impression that the earth has been ripped open in a way it shouldn’t have been. The Rodans themselves are colored reddish-brown, while the Meganulon are a lighter shade of brown, reflecting both species’s subterranean origin. The major color contrast in the film is provided by the sharp blue sky that the Rodans lay claim to, which ensures that the scenes of them soaring through the air carry even greater visual impact. Overall, Honda’s first film in color excels at the format, using it to enhance the themes of the script rather than simply throw an Eastmancolor gloss over it.

Honda’s direction particularly enhances the first half of the film, treating the mining town as a character in itself. Honda and cinematographer Ashida Isamu deftly convey the community’s reaction to the unfolding horror, such as the horizontal tracking shot as a dead miner is wheeled through a meeting center past a series of packed rooms. The camera movement starts when the first person in the first room comes to the window to look, then tracks along with the cart as it passes different office windows, each frame filling with the faces of the personnel who come up to take a look. Thus, the appearance of a new corpse is absorbed like a wave, traveling room by room. Rodan pays as much attention to misinformation spreading through the town; before the Meganulon make their appearance, a missing miner named Goro is blamed for the murders. Goro happens to be the brother of Kiyo (Shirawaka Yumi), Shigeru’s love interest, who is shunned by many in the town because of the rumor. Honda’s camera observes the way that gossip or contempt spread like ripples over groups of passerby who spot Kiyo. Finally, a large group of grieving women harass Shiyo outside her home, in the way that white blood cells might attack an illness. Honda’s emphasis on the collective character of the town in its unity and divisions makes up for the fact that none of its individual characters are well-developed, just as the film’s uncanny atmosphere pushes its themes to the forefront where the script falls short.

The human interest does lapse considerably after Shigeru’s flashback, as Rodan’s second half transitions away from the town into being a monster-hunting procedural. But the film still has a major ace up its sleeve: the Rodans themselves. The puppets used for shots requiring lots of head movement are a little off, and the flying models vary greatly in how on-model they look compared to the suit. But the suit itself is a thing of glory: I am comfortable declaring it Tsuburaya and team’s finest kaiju creation to that point. I love the look of the original Godzilla suit, but there are later designs of the character that are closer to my heart. Whereas I think Rodan’s original suit design has never been bettered, even if it has been matched. The sculpt perfectly captures the feeling of a pterosaur while also incorporating an almost gargoyle-like texture into the face that gives the creature added personality. Played by Godzilla suit actor Nakajima Haruo, Rodan comes across as a looser and wilder beast than the lumbering, brooding Godzilla, which fits the impression of a kaiju that would prefer to spend most of its active time soaring through the air. (Admittedly, the visible wires extending from the suit’s wings can be quite distracting at times. Nowadays, with a simple digital airbrush, you wouldn’t have that problem…but the underlying footage would still be charming and spectacular with or without the wires, which is the criteria we judge these films by.)

The suit stands in for both the Rodans, with the flying models used whenever the two need to appear in shot together. It’s not the only great visual related to the kaiju; when in flight, the Rodans leave vapor trails behind them like a plane, which provides a striking visual signifier for how fast the monsters travel. And the Rodans aren’t the only great spectacle on display. Pound for pound, the miniature work is a cut above either of the Godzilla films. Honda himself would later single out the Rodans’ attack on the city of Fukuoka as a sequence Tsuburaya’s crew put a great deal of skill and love into. Equally impressive are the effects in the finale, set back at Mount Aso, when the military corners the sleeping Rodans and bombards the mountain until the active volcano erupts. (Real molten metal was used to portray the lava flowing down the mountainside!)

Ah yes, the finale, which so broke my heart at age seven. After the military’s extended bombardment, the two Rodans emerge from the erupting volcano. One of them descends toward the lava, where it catches aflame. Moments later, the other Rodan, seemingly in distress, descends to join its partner in death.

The first Rodan model falling into the lava was, in fact, a special effects accident, but the resulting footage perfectly set the tone for the ending. For the Rodans’ death appears to be none other than a double suicide. In Japanese culture, two or more lovers dying by suicide together, has long had romantic connotations. In Japanese feudal society, where caste divisions and arranged marriages made many romantic engagements untenable, double suicide gained cultural weight as an act of love against the odds, with the romantic entanglement in question guaranteed to continue in heaven if all involved perished together. Also known as love suicide, double suicide became a popular subject of popular culture such as paintings, puppet shows, and plays that are still famous to this day.

Arranged marriages were still commonplace in Japan by the nineteen fifties; Honda himself made several films that included the topic as a theme. Leaving aside questions of cultural relativism, morality, and taste involved in the glamorization of suicide, it is absolutely the case that the Rodans’ love suicide is intended to be viewed as a sympathetic gesture by the audience. Kiyo, watching the scene with Shigeru, turns her face to his shoulder in distress when the Rodans die; she recognizes it as a moment of sadness. Even more bluntly than Gojira, Rodan ends up treating its rampaging kaiju as tragic characters worthy of our sympathy. 

Once again, Toho’s kaiju films end up being more humane than their roots: Lovecraftian dangers they might be, but unlike Lovecraft’s irredeemable creations, the free-flying Rodans are ultimately victims of the civilized world’s atomic testing and environmental destruction, unleashed into a civilization that has no place for them. And they’re not the only ones to suffer at the conclusion. The military’s attack happens with the reluctant cooperation of the mining village, whose local forestry and fields will be destroyed by the Mount Aso eruption. Military violence’s solution to the threat ends up causing more environmental damage of the sort that caused the problem in the first place, with the working community at the heart of the crisis left to deal with the fallout. Once again in Honda’s giant monster films, humanity as a whole may have gained a temporary triumph, but the “victory” is a deeply bitter one for the ordinary people caught up in the fight. 

Rodan accomplishes all that it does without matching the lightning-in-a-bottle quality of Gojira, and in doing so proved something important: Toho’s tokusatsu films didn’t have to meet that high bar in order to be terrific popcorn entertainment. This was, in some sense, a necessary accomplishment. To make great films, you have to establish a solid baseline of quality for making good films, a criteria that both Godzilla Raids Again and Half Human hadn’t quite satisfied. Even with two-dimensional characters and a relative lack of emotional impact, Rodan succeeds at remixing the themes of the Godzilla films with a fresh spin that doesn’t feel too beholden to its predecessors. It also proved that Tanaka Tomoyuki, Honda, Tsuburaya, and their writers had plenty of inspiration when it came to creating new monsters for the screen; I should lay my bias out front that Rodan is tied with the burrowing monster Baragon as my favorite non-Godzilla kaiju in Toho’s pantheon, but the flying monster’s iconic stature is more than justified by its impressive debut here. Rodan proved, if nothing else, that spiritual follow-ups to the Godzilla films were an artistically viable path, and that there was plenty of gas left in the tank for Toho’s tokusatsu productions. The only question is what fresh angle they would explore next.

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