While the original 1954 Godzilla remains a startling effective film, it’s clearly also something improvising a genre as it went along, experimenting with special effects, with tone, and with ideas throughout its run time—it becomes its most cohesive mainly during its latter half. It’s the starting point for all kaiju films to follow, but the point where Ishiro Honda, Eiji Tsuburaya, and the rest of their crew really found the path forward was two years later in Rodan (Japanese title Giant Monster of the Sky Radon, and the name will always have two vowel-switched regional variations for the rest of time), the first kaiju film in colour, and the one where Honda found a steady way to handle this type of story. It is kind of amazing to see what a difference two years can make, and how quickly these filmmakers went from figuring out how similar and different these movies could be from their American counterparts to finding their footing in this entirely idiosyncratic take on monster movie, allowing them to experiment with the details of the genre instead.
Thematically and morally, Rodan is a much simpler experience than Godzilla, a prehistoric monster attack film that doesn’t evocatively call upon the recent traumas of its nation of origin to give its imagery power…or, at least, not directly. The Atomic Nightmare aspect is not entirely absent from the story—head paleontologist Kyoichiro Kashiwagi (Akihiko Hirata, in his second of many, many times playing a scientist in an Ishiro Honda monster movie) speculates in front of a crowd of reporters that atomic weapons testing may have caused a shifting in the tectonic plates, creating a situation where long-buried prehistoric animals are suddenly surfacing in the modern day, but he makes it clear that it is merely a hypothesis. Still, the fact that writers Takeo Murata and frequent Honda collaborator Takeshi Kimura (future scripter of fellow Creature Classics Matango and War of the Gargantuas, among many others), working from a story idea by Ken Kuronoma, have it there at all suggests that they wanted this possibility to remain in the mind of the audience, not simply as a cliche, but as a reminder of the world that they live in. The little conversational details in the first part of the movie suggest that this is a story about the consequences of a changing environment, with characters noting that they’re experiencing a heat wave and even bringing up “the theory of global warming”—in 1956! The monsters here are not nuclear mutants like Godzilla, but their ability to invade our space may have come because of thoughtless humanity meddling, unknowingly releasing them just as conditions begin to resemble what had allowed them to thrive millions of years ago.
The three acts of the movie have distinctive atmospheres, and all eventually revolve around the surprise reveal of a new monster for the cast to contend with. The first takes place in a coal mining town at the base of Mount Aso, one of the largest active volcanoes in the world, and we get a real sense of the working class existence here, with miners going about their business and getting into fistfights with their rivals over personal matters we only get a glimpse of, and their families waiting back home to see if their husbands even come back from their dangerous job digging up “black diamonds”, as one supervisor calls them. Honda has a particular love of these mundane dynamics, something he gets less of a chance to indulge in as the Toho kaiju lineage continues on, and there is a genuine reality to these small town relationships, even after he introduces the monster part of the story. Once our main crew, led by mine safety engineer Shigeru (Kenji Sahara, another member of Honda’s stable getting a major role early on), begins finding the severely mangled bodies of missing miners, the scenes of their wives and families wailing in the hospital halls recall some of the more disturbing moments in Godzilla—and the drama extends to the barely contained rage aimed at Kiyo (Yumi Shirakawa, later to star in The H-Man), whose brother is the main suspect behind the murders.
The actual culprits are, as one would guess, monsters hanging out in the mines—in this case, gigantic prehistoric dragonfly nymphs called Meganurons (while prehistoric dragonfly-like animals are the largest known insects in history they, um, aren’t as big as these ones), their surviving eggs uncovered by the aforementioned tectonic shifts. These insectoid horrors were inspired by another classic monster movie of the time, Them!, and the scenes of them skulking around the mine shafts invoke that movie’s climactic set piece in the LA storm tunnels. An entire police force ends up being called upon to deal with the giant bug problem, but that turns out the least of their worries: the Megnurons (which are referenced in later Godzilla movies, and even have an even larger “queen” version that acts as the main antagonist of 2000’s Godzilla vs. Megaguirus) are actually on the bottom of their primeval food chain, providing nourishment for newly-hatched, pteranodon-like creatures dubbed Rodan, or Radon, a name that might be based on the element, but is probably just supposed to be closer to “pteranodon.”
The first one to witness the birth of Rodan is Shigeru after being buried in a cave-in, and he spends much of the second act suffering from PTSD-induced amnesia, Sahara communicating the horror and tragedy through his mute, confused stares. Shigeru’s bout with memory loss is probably the last time in the film there are any real characters—the working class supporting class are kept in the first act, while the rest of the movie mostly involves various military and science types, led by Hirata’s paleontologist, devising ways to deal with the increasing threat of Rodan after it breaks out from Mt. Aso, with Shigeru joining them once he gets his memory back. No one in this script is as compelling as Hirata’s previous role as Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla, but even in this streamlined horror-action script, those moments of humanity from early on still register.
All three of the Toho Kaiju Power Trio get a chance to up their game here: aside from Honda, we have Akira Ifukube’s swelling score bolstering the atmosphere, while the switch to colour and the varying scale of the effects give Tsuburaya & Co the opportunity to go wild on the details of the miniatures. Here we get to see them create fully-realized miniature cities, with realistically rendered details and signage, and find creative ways to tear it down—as a flying monster, Rodan’s primary method of destruction is to create hurricane-force winds by merely moving, flinging cars and other objects into the side of buildings and stripping roofs of all their shingles. If giant monsters are often portrayed as living natural disasters, the imagery here is very specific and very different from the destruction and terror seen in Godzilla—the way that this monster can basically appear anywhere at any time makes for a scarier experience, the open sky a source of dread that Honda takes full advantage of. Notable among the elaborate effects is the bending of Saikai Bridge as Rodan zooms over it, a shot that the effects team only had one opportunity to get, and ended with suit actor Haruko Nakajima accidentally falling twenty-five feet into the water after a wire snapped. Earlier scenes where Rodan is mostly seen flying around leaving contrails (why? Because it looks cool, dummy. How? Who cares!) while being chased by fighter jets are simpler in execution but quite fun, and the use of matte paintings and other effects to have the silhouette of Rodan appear over cities and other locations is effectively executed. They even recreate the moment from Godzilla of the monster suddenly appearing over the hill, and it works just as well in colour. Even some of the smaller moments are imaginative and well-directed: the thing that ultimately restores Shigeru’s memory—giving us a flashback to Rodan hatching from its massive egg—is seeing a baby bird begin to hatch out of its own egg, a shot that might actually look more disturbing than the proceeding scene of the newborn monster dwarfing the previously terrifying Meganurons.
It’s also inventive how the script—and Tsuburaya’s effects—incorporate UFO sightings and imagery, another obsession of the mid-fifties. In the early goings of the second act, Rodan is not initially identified as a flying monster, but instead as a flying saucer, and the scenes where it is chased by the jet were apparently inspired by the Mantell UFO Incident that took place in Kentucky in 1948, one of the first “major” UFO stories that helped fuel the next decade’s worth of cinematic alien encounters. Taking a UFO story and turning it into one about a giant flying reptile (who is so fast that it visits not just Japan, but also Shanghai and Manila, both places represented entirely by women reading off radio reports in a single room) is certainly a twist, and the misidentification plot point was used again more recently in Nope—given that movie’s reverence for monster movie history, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jordan Peele had this as a direct inspiration. Incidentally, when Rodan was released in English—in a version that was ten minutes shorter and featured unnecessary extra narration and dub voices by the likes of Keye Luke, George Takei, and Paul Frees—it ended up being one of the more financially successful Sci-Fi movies of the decade.
The movie’s final twist in the last act is to reveal that there were, in fact, two Rodans the entire time—which was lightly hinted at in dialogue when a character mentions that it would be impossible for Rodan to appear in so many places so quickly. Realizing that the only way to deal with these monsters is to trap them in their nest beneath Mt. Aso, our heroic exposition-deliverers are told that the necessary bombardment would also activate the volcano, annihilating the entire surrounding area—they sombrely acknowledge that inevitability, but recognize that there is no other way to deal with the threat of the two flying monsters. The whole ending sequence carries a similar conflicted tone, embodying the high and low ambitions of monster movies like Rodan: we spend at least five minutes watching the side of a mountain explode, another showcase of miniature effects, followed by one of the monsters engulfed in the flames of the ensuing lava flow, while the other hovers overhead before falling on top of its companion and dying with it. Apparently part of this scene was accidental, with a wire snapping and dropping the puppet too early, but Honda and/or Tsuburaya decided to keep the shot in, getting the puppeteer to feign the monster’s final struggle, and using Ifukube’s music (parts of which are likely being referenced in the song he would use for the death of Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah almost forty years later) and an alteration of the monster’s iconic roar to make it sound like a sad final act of animal heartbreak. The humans look on, but there is no triumph there—we are still in the era where all the death and destruction and the fated demise of these animals-out-of-time are recognized as a sad and terrible business for everyone involved. Rodan is influential as a technical exercise and refinement of the genre, but it also maintains the sense of empathy that make Honda’s kaiju films so distinctive.
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