by Garrett Smith, Contributor

Welcome to BIG IDEAS, SMALL BUDGETS, in which I will be examining movies that take big swings with shallow pockets. Everyone knows Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,000, which is indeed an impressively small price tag for a legitimately exciting action movie. But if you told me you could make a movie about a musician that gets mistaken for a hitman for $7,000, I would believe you. I would, however, be less inclined to believe you could make a movie about a vampire lair that gets mistaken for a bar for that much money, just as a random example (From Dusk till Dawn cost $19 million). This column will focus on movies that I consider to have “big ideas” at their core and feel even larger when you consider how little money went into making them. I expect that most of the movies I cover will be genre movies, if not specifically science-fiction movies, and that I will be spoiling them in great detail.

This month our subject is a relevant oldie:

Gojira (dir. Ishirō Honda, 1954).

Say, what’s the big idea?

After discovering a series of destroyed boats off the coast of Odo Island, the island is attacked by a giant creature resembling a dinosaur, towering at 50 m tall. When the creature resurfaces in Tokyo Bay, ultimately laying waste to the Japanese Self-Defense Forces’ electrified fence and other defenses with its atomic breath, it is decided that Dr. Serizawa’s “Oxygen Destroyer” will be used against it. While it is believed that this creature, dubbed Gojira by an Odo Island elder, is an ancient sea creature evolved by nuclear testing, the choice is reluctantly made to use this alternative weapon with the capability to destroy all sea life against Gojira.

And they did that with how much money

Approximately $275,000 total, broken up into a $175,000 production budget and a $100,000 advertising budget, post-production.

Well how’d they pull that off?

The road to production for the movie that would ultimately become known as Godzilla around the world is a long and winding one. It didn’t even start as a monster movie, but ultimately producer Tomoyuki Tanaka settled on an idea based on the American film The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and the real-life Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident in which 23 Japanese fishermen were contaminated nuclear fallout as the result of the United States nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll. These ideas would ultimately serve as the opening scene of the movie and give way to the idea of a giant monster that acts as a metaphor for the nuclear destruction wrought on Japan by the U.S. during WWII. To keep within budget, special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya had to develop a new technique in animation that would become known as “suitmation” in which an actor would don a rubber monster suit and destroy miniature models of cities. The original suit weighed almost 220 lbs and was supplemented with a mechanical hand puppet when possible.

Did it work?

It’s very possible that American readers have not seen the original Japanese cut of Gojira, as for many years only the American re-edit was widely available. The American edit reduces a lot of the nuclear thematics that point directly at the United States and adds an American hero character (Raymond Burr). Thanks to The Criterion Collection, you can now watch Gojira in its original form, and I cannot recommend it enough. Given the cultural awareness of Godzilla as a big scary monster that is sometimes friendly to children, I think you’ll be blown away by the power the original movie has. While you probably think of the suitmation technique as inherently silly, likely picturing two actors in rubber suits performing wrestling moves on each other, in the original movie there are no such monster-on-monster battles. There is only violent, indifferent destruction as the express result of America’s use of nuclear force against the Japanese people, and it is genuinely terrifying. You pretty immediately stop thinking about Godzilla as a person in a suit and instead spend the runtime thinking about how it must have felt to be a citizen of Japan at this time. It’s a prime example of Ebert’s suggestion of movies as empathy machines.

Was it successful?

I imagine the fact that another Godzilla movie just hit theaters this year is enough evidence of the property’s continued relevance and success around the globe. Boasting 35+ sequels, it is the longest running film franchise in history. The original 1954 movie holds a 93% Critic Score on Rotten Tomatoes (and an 89% Audience Score) and while grosses for movies this old are difficult to confirm, one source claims 9.6 million tickets were sold in Japan during its initial release. And just the 2004 re-release in America garnered it another $500,000 or so at the box office. The critical reception in Japan was initially mixed, treating it like an exploitation film. It wasn’t until it reached America in its bastardized form in 1956 that international critics started praising it as a truly great horror movie, even in spite of the ways the re-edit attempts to erase some of the underlying politics.

Why should I watch it?

I saw exactly two Godzilla movies in my youth - one of the later Shōwa era sequels (from the sillier period of the Japanese produced movies) and the 1998 American version directed by Roland Emmerich. Neither grabbed me in the way most G-fans describe, where they saw those rubber monster battles and were smitten for life. I kind of actively avoided watching the original for a long time because I just didn’t get what people enjoyed about these, and I had no idea what a different kind of movie the original really was. It wasn’t until a few years ago when this movie popped up on (I think) Shout Factory’s early streaming website that I actually decided to give these movies another shot. That viewing would quite literally change my life and make me a different kind of movie fan.

I’ve since seen every Godzilla movie ever produced, including the nearly impossible to find Italian re-edit from the 1970s (referred to as Cozzilla, taken from director Luigi Cozzi’s name). I’ve also become an enormous fan of Japanese cinema, seeking out more productions from Toho and other rival studios like Toei and Nikkatsu. And in general my growing fandom of these international b-movies has expanded my taste in film across both arenas. 126 of the 230 movies I’ve watched so far this year have been international productions, many of them from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, stretching across Italy, Mexico, Australia, Japan, and various regions of the UK. I no longer see 2-star reviews and think “I’ll avoid that”, instead letting a good synopsis catch my interest, or a creative team I’ve otherwise enjoyed be the reason to watch.

This one movie had the power to completely change my tastes as a movie goer. And not just towards monster movies; but towards classic, towards international productions, and towards lower budgets and riskier filmmakers. Gojira has become one of my all-time favorite movies, not just for its legacy at large, but for the legacy it now holds with me personally. As far as small budgets making a (pardon the pun) monstrous impact, you need look no further than Gojira.