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by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

I’m not a big “cryer” when it comes to the movies, but it’s happened. I’ve been watching a movie and then, out of nowhere, I’m caught off guard and, what the hell? I’m crying? It happens. Even as a kid, I know a lot of the big ones made me sad, or maybe emotionally destroyed me, but, like–seeing the horse die in The Neverending Story made me feel like shit, but I didn’t cry. As a kid, here are the movies I remember bringing me to tears:

Milo & Otis, where the cat and the dog get separated.
My Girl, after Macaulay Culkin is stung to death by wasps and Anna Chlumsky demands, “He can’t see without his glasses!” at his funeral.
Free Willy, that famous shot of the whale going over the kid. That one really caught me by surprise because I was like, this movie’s okay. It’s fine… but the music swelled and, ahh… it was well-earned, that moment.

But the first movie to ever make me cry? That belongs to Godzilla 1985. I remember at the time I first saw it, I was four or five. And the movie goes to great lengths to tell you, hey, Godzilla is not to blame, here. Godzilla is a force of nature doing what a force of nature does. He never asked to be here. He never asked to be born. He’s just here, he’s scared, and what’s happening is a tragedy. I started getting nervous. When Godzilla is killed and all the heroes of the film look disgusted, I just lost it. I asked my parents why couldn’t they just keep him in a big cage?!

“I just don’t think he’d fit in a cage, honey,” my mom tried to console me.

“They didn’t even try!”

I watched Godzilla 1985 a lot when I was a kid. It was one of the few tapes I had, and I remember the tape being rad. It had an extra flap with some blurbs, some screenshots, and the tape had a little short before the feature: Godzilla Vs Bambi, a little 30-second short of a deer, presumably Bambi, eating grass, then SPLAT! Godzilla’s gigantic foot crushes the deer, its little legs splayed out. It’s not great entertainment, but when I was a kid, that was the height of hilarity for me.

It occurred to me recently that I haven’t seen Godzilla 1985 since I was a kid, and it was high time for a re-watch. Before this modern era of films we know now, with reboots being the norm, Godzilla 1985 was setting a trend. It decided that it would only acknowledge the original Godzilla: King of the Monsters and all of the goofy sequels were part of a separate canon. It was originally released in Japan as The Return of Godzilla, and would return to a darker, more serious tone, like the original Gojira. And like the original Gojira, when it came to America, America decided to re-film certain scenes, re-title it and add in some superfluous Raymond Burr scenes. Raymond Burr’s inclusion in Godzilla 1985 is even more incongruous. He tries his best with what he’s got, and I think he does pretty damn well in a thankless role that has nothing to do with anything. He watches the action from afar and adds little observations about how futile it is to treat Godzilla as anything other than a disaster by and for humanity, a punishment against our sins.

Which, sure. I get it. We created Godzilla, and goddamn us for doing so. Our meddling in nuclear technology and inhumanity against ourselves. But, like… we gotta try to stop this giant, nuclear dinosaur. It’s nice to be smug and all, but someone’s gotta come up with some ideas, even if it’s not totally cool to do so.

I was mostly bored with the re-watch. I thought it was okay. The first ten minutes, I was in Nostalgiatown. The New World Pictures logo, with Godzilla’s iconic roar, took me back. The opening scenes are incredible, particularly when our hero is introduced and climbs aboard a fishing boat filled with victims of radiation poisoning caused by the Big Guy. And then he battles a Godzilla-sized… what I assume to be a flea or parasite, dropped onto the ship.

After that, there’s a lot of Cold War Era fears, some Pentagon scenes, some anti-nuclear philosophizing, and some pretty decent action sequences. A lot of doldrums. I knew Godzilla 1985 wasn’t great, but I had such fond memories of it, I was disappointed to find that much of that was due to the fact that I have such a history with it. It was the first Godzilla movie I’d ever seen.

But then came the ending. The ending, the first in my life to ever make me cry. Folks, it’s… masterful. It’s so well done. Godzilla is lured to a volcano with the sounds of birds. He’s related to birds, and he follows their sounds into a trap. They plan on luring him in, blowing it to hell, and he’ll be trapped inside and burned alive in the volcano’s impossible heat. We see him crest the hill in a shot from a telephoto lens, shaky and sort of out of focus, to lend some realism to it. He reaches the volcano and then finds the bird sounds are coming from an emitter. And the Big Guy just sort of resigns himself. He knows it’s a trap. He fucking knows. So he steps forward anyway. The ground gives way and he’s inside the mouth of the volcano. He sees there’s no way out, and begins to panic. Then KABOOM! the bombs go off and he is killed in a dramatic finale, screeching in the fires and lava, as everyone watches in horror.

My final verdict? I hear The Return of Godzilla is the better film in some ways, but 1985 improves on it in others. All in all, I’d say Godzilla 1985 is fine, with some neat sequences that work, long stretches of boredom in a very short running time, with a fantastic ending.