Rodan (1956)

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.