Rodan

Rodan (1956)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

This is a milestone: Toho's first daikaiju movie in glorious colour! It’s not the first to be filmed in the “Tohoscope” widescreen format – that’ll be The Three Treasures (1959) or, if that’s not monstery enough for you, Mothra (1961).

Rodan opens with a couple of mining company employees talking about global warming and polar ice melting (in 1956!), just before one of the mine shafts in the vicinity of Mt Aso is reported as flooded. Not all the miners make it out safely – a couple of bodies are recovered, but they didn’t drown. The deaths are initially blamed on a miner who was earlier seen fighting with one of the victims and has disappeared, which leads to some juicy human drama between the surviving family and colleagues. The coroner is at a loss over the victims’ wounds, which seem to have been inflicted by a large, sharp blade of some kind. The descriptions of the bodies, and what we see of them, are surprisingly gruesome. More deaths, of miners and of the investigating police officers, follow. We, the viewers, know that they’ve been attacked by an unseen creature that makes bleeping, chittering sounds.

Shigeru, a young mine engineer, is engaged to Kiyo, the sister of the suspected murderer. He goes round to her house to comfort her after she’s verbally assaulted by the wives of the dead miners. Suddenly an enormous insectoid creature bursts into the house and forces them to flee. The police and miners chase the creature back to the mineshaft, where they sustain further casualties and find the missing miner’s body. It’s now clear to all that the creatures – the mineshaft is crawling with them – were responsible for the deaths. Shigeru is trapped by a cave-in and the others run for the surface, fearing an earthquake.

The next day, the paleontologist Dr Kashiwagi is called in. (Why they’ve chosen to consult a paleontologist, I don’t know, but as it turns out it’s a lucky call.) He identifies the creature as a kind of prehistoric giant dragonfly nymph which he calls Meganulon. (Insects of the genus Meganeura lived during the Carboniferous Period, roughly 300 million years ago – Dr Kashiwagi erroneously suggests they were around 20 million years ago.) The Meganulons are a bit larger than human size, with long, segmented bodies and tails, large mandibles and claws. Although Dr Kashiwagi believes them to be larvae, they also have the compound eyes and six legs of adult insects. They're not vulnerable to gunfire, but a train of full coal wagons runs one over quite effectively.

At this point there’s another earthquake, and an amnesiac Shigeru is found wandering above ground. Meanwhile, something bursts out of the ground at Mt Aso, tussling with JASDF planes and causing UFO sightings over Beijing, Manila and Tokyo. It would be easy to suppose that this is an adult Meganulon, but in fact we never see one of those. Photographic and witness evidence eventually convinces Dr Kashiwagi that it’s some kind of prehistoric flying reptile. He names the new creature Radon, although in English this becomes Rodan.

Rodan is a large, leathery, winged creature resembling a pterosaur. (Allegedly a pteranodon, hence the name (pte)RA(no)DON, but Rodan shows the characteristics of a pterodactyl. Pteranodons had large crests on their heads while pterodactyls had skulls with no crests. The newly hatched Rodan shows a flat head with the stubs of two horns, and in adulthood these become two long swept-back horns that might conceivably be mistaken for a crest. Pterodactyls had teeth in their beak and pteranodons didn't – Rodan has teeth.)

We see a mating pair of Rodans in this film. They mature rapidly. Shigeru's amnesia has been triggered by the shock of seeing one hatch – we're not explicitly told how long his amnesia lasts, but it feels like no more than a few days, and by that time the fully grown Rodans are terrorising the JASDF. They eat Meganulons, cows and people. They can fly 1.5 times the speed of a JASDF fighter, fast enough to produce a sonic boom. Even when flying at slower speeds, their wake is powerful enough to bend and destroy a metal bridge over a river. They can also cause destructive winds by flapping their wings. Like the Meganulons, they're impervious to conventional weapons.

The JSDF develops a plan to defeat the Rodans by proxy, by shelling Mt Aso to provoke a volcanic eruption and destroy the creatures’ nest with lava. The mining town is evacuated and the plan enacted when the adult Rodans are present. It turns out that they’re not impervious to lava. Presumably the subterranean Meganulons are also destroyed, if they haven’t all been eaten by the Rodans, but we’re not explicitly told their fate.

Let’s get the mundane stuff out of the way first. Nice to see Hirata Akihiko, who played the doomed Dr Serizawa in Godzilla (1954), playing another scientist as Dr Kashiwagi. This time, he isn’t wearing an eyepatch. The youthful hero Shigeru is played by Sahara Kenji, another one to watch out for.

The second half of the film, featuring the kaiju who’s actually named in the title, is fine, but I prefer the first half. The first scene of a Meganulon attack is extremely effective. The creatures remain unseen, we just hear their bleeps/chitters and see members of the search party pulled under the water in the flooded mine. Their noises owe something, I think, to the giant ants in Them! (1954), although the Meganulon costumes worn by stunt actors look a lot better than the puppet ants in the American movie. The sudden appearance of one at Kiyo's house, even though it immediately shows us the full costume, is no less effective thanks to its shock value. The mountainside confrontation that follows is also well staged.

This film feels like two ideas welded together: the creeping horror at the Mt Aso mine and the slambang military campaign against the two Rodans. The first gives way abruptly to the second and is soon forgotten, barring Shigeru's discovery of the Rodan egg hatching among the Meganulons, which we see in a luridly coloured flashback. Yet it doesn't seem there's enough meat in the Rodan story, so it has to be padded out with lengthy scenes of explosions. The JSDF bombardment of the Rodans' nesting site at Mt Aso goes on for what feels like forever, including the same shot of a missile being launched over and over again. Then there's another abrupt shift at the end into pathos as everyone stands around silently mourning the deaths of the Rodans, which appear to dive resignedly into the lava after their nest is destroyed. This is quite a disjointed movie.

The style overall is somewhat in line with America’s creature features. The monsters are explicitly prehistoric animals (or at least, based on them), members of a species and not named individuals. In later daikaiju eiga, Rodan will be the proper name of an entity who appears in crossovers with Godzilla. Those lone monsters are more prone to being reinterpreted as something supernatural, perhaps kami or embodiments of some incomprehensible force. Here, the Rodans are just big pest animals, and the military succeed in corralling them and blowing them up. Perhaps Rodan owes more to Them! than might first appear.

There's some talk among fans that Rodan's impact on Tokyo is meant to call to mind the aerial assaults and fire-bombing of the Second World War. (At one point, Dr Kashiwagi also suggests the Rodans and Meganulons might have been revived by nuclear testing, but that comes out of nowhere and really feels like the writers just threw it in to cover all the bases. As noted in the plot summary, the Japanese name of the creature, Radon, derives from the word “pteranodon” and has nothing to do with the radioactive element.) In the context of the film, it's only one brief scene and, as far as the effects of Rodan's sonic boom flying and wing flapping are concerned, it looks more like a hurricane or a tsunami. Between this, the opening conversation about climate change, the flooding and earthquakes at the mine and the JSDF's bombardment of Mt Aso causing a small volcanic eruption, it looks like this film might be more about natural disasters and the dangers of life as a miner than about warfare or nuclear tests.