The Japanese classic Kaiju movie Rodan (1956) is a queer mixture of the cheesy and the believable which, to some extent, actually works in its construction of a cautionary tale concerning the use of powers beyond belief releasing horrors also beyond belief.
The concept of a creature with a 500 foot wingspan and the ability to cruise at speeds greater than Mach 1 is, of course, laughable, although I did consider that, since the Rodans don’t flag their wings at high speeds, they must propel themselves through extreme flatulence. On the other hand, much of the balance of the science was at least credible, especially since the large insects which first inflict themselves upon the local populace have their counterparts in respectable paleontology. Because we’re talking about a fable, faking a bit of credulity in the interests of poetic license is not beyond the pale.
The opportunity to marvel at the models employed by the film makers is also something of a pleasure, even as the models implode, collapse, blow around, and are otherwise deconstructed by nature and monster. While the humans are mostly interchangeable, at least some ingenuity is displayed in the struggles against the various feral critters that appear to lust after human flesh, and this helps us swallow the more extreme elements of the story, bringing a certain human empathy to the victims, indirect as they may be, of the American’s hydrogen bomb that is said to awaken the creatures.
But perhaps most interesting was the ending: the Japanese, having located the sleeping monsters in a dormant volcano, proceed to bombard their quarters with such fury that the volcano itself awakens. As the two Rodans (or, as my Arts Editor was heard to mutter, “the rubber bats”) fluttered above the bubbling lava, rather than attacking their tormentors, they proceed to execute a sort of monstrous suicide, flinging themselves into the lava while bewailing their fates, all to the narration of one of the humans. It’s not entirely clear why the former rulers of the world have chosen to die rather than face down their restive prey, but perhaps it rang true for the Japanese culture of the 1950s. Perhaps they symbolized something important – the virtual fall of the Japanese dynasty (made impotent by the Americans after World War II), or how the Japanese are seeing change in everything, how the old can no longer cling to its old power and will now be discarded.
Or it’s just a silly ending to a silly movie. Your mileage will vary.
