After watching Godzilla vs. Mothra, I did, in fact, pop this DVD in for my next movie watching a night or so later.
This film is eight years older than the Godzilla movie I just watched and features the origin of Rodan, or at least of the species known as Rodan. Miners digging coal near a volcano in Japan reach an unheard of depth, and water floods the cave, leading to two missing miners who previously scuffled on the surface. The film plays out for the first portion like a horror movie: Something in that deep tunnel is deadly, but what is it? They eventually discover that giant insects are killing the miners and investigators. When the army goes in with force, a cave-in separates an engineer from the rest, and when he is found on the surface, he has amnesia. Meanwhile, a supersonic UFO is devastating different cities in Asia and defeats, somehow, some military jets. The engineer recovers his memory when his fiancée shows a nest with one of her songbirds’ eggs in it, ready to hatch: In the mine, he saw an egg hatching, and the giant winged creature ate the giant insects. From then on, it’s a straight-up monster movie with the military trying to deal with the giant dinosaurs (there are two) who seem impervious to bombs, missiles, and artillery. Spoiler alert: The barrage triggers a volcanic eruption which kills the pair, although a voiceover at the end indicates that the remaining mate might not wanted to live without its partner.
A fairly short film, of course, and again it hearkens back to my youth when we saw these movies “all the time” (again, where “all the time” might have meant on ten or fifteen Saturday afternoons in our eternal youth).
So I got to thinking: It’s clear that this film was made with models and toys in the cases of most of the military equipment and destroyed cityscapes. But we were kind of forgiving of this back in the day because that’s how our toys looked and so they were fake, but akin to what our imaginations produced on their own. Modern films look a lot like video games with all the computer imagery, and I’ve probably mentioned that I’ve found old films upscaled to 4K or whatever to look like video games, too, with different layers of things pretty clearly grouped together for rendering. But how do modern films look to my children, whose toys for the last five years or so and even before them, were video games and screen-based. Did it impact their imaginations so that modern films more clearly align with how they imagine things (if they imagine things outside what the screens provide)? How much of our youthful amusements shape our imaginations not only in content, but in shapes, appearances, textures, and the other underlying framework?
An interesting thought exercise, and were it my job, I could go into great and kind of tedious detail about it. But, gentle reader, as you know, I have no job, so I will not.
