Strange to say, I had never seen the original Godzilla (1954). I'm not even sure that I saw the Americanized edit with Raymond Burr. I have now corrected this.
It starts at sea, with sailors hanging around the deck of a freighter. When something destroys it, another ship comes to the rescue, and vanishes. The few survivors are picked up by another ship, but the joy is short-lived - that ship goes down too. The only remaining fisherman makes it ashore, and babbles about a great monster. People scoff until that monster - Godzilla - rampages through the village. A scientific expedition, lead by Takashi Shimura, arrives and finds destruction, giant footprints, and radioactivity. Then Godzilla itself appears.
There are a number of "our weapons are powerless against him" scenes, but we turn now to Shimura-san's daughter, Momoko Kochi. She is engaged to Akihiko Hirata, but has fallen in love with Akira Takarada. Takarada-san is a salvage boat operator, working with Shimura-san. Hirata-san, on the other hand, is a grim, cynical scientist with an eyepatch. Dashing in a manga sort of way. He has developed a secret weapon, but it's much too dangerous to be unleashed upon the world.
Then Godzilla shows up in Tokyo.
We found this to be much more powerful than we expected. The destruction of ship after ship, with no known cause, makes the appearance of the monster very powerful. Shimura-san, the scientist, wants to study Godzilla, not destroy him, and he also correctly notes that H-bombs just wake him up. Then there's the love triangle, with a sweet girl, her manly boyfriend, and scorned fiance, the doomed romantic Hirata-san. The special effects aren't exactly hyper-realistic, but they are very powerful if you can relax your standards a little.
Now, our favorite kaiju movie.
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