Rodan

The first non-Godzilla movie on our list! Rodan was released in December of 1956 and the first movie in color. We're watching progress happen as we watch kaiju flicks, folks! Directed by familiar name Ishirō Honda and with the titular kaiju played by famed Godzilla suit actor Haruo Nakajima, this is a movie definitely made in the same vein of any other Godzilla movie, just with no appearance by the Big G. Let's get to the point.

If You Haven't Seen it Before

- Miners doing miner shit. A series of murders begins to happen, all the men sliced with an "incredibly sharp" object.

- Initially falsely thought to be the work of a particularly ornery miner, the true culprit is revealed to be a giant ancient dragonfly larvae named Meganulon.

-  An earthquake follows. Some time later, a fighter jet pilot sees an "unknown aircraft" doing loops in the sky, faster than his state of the art machine. As he approaches it he's unable to do anything but shout that it's huge before his plane is cut in half and he dies.

- While passing by and killing a couple in the mountains, presumably by accident, the new creature is identified as a giant Pteranodon: the titular Rodan.

- Rodan is hunted down by the military and attacked, in full view of civilians. They are able to slow but not stop Rodan as bridges, buildings, trains, and planes get destroyed.

- Eventually pinned down by tanks and other artillery, Rodan appears to be losing before a 2nd Rodan appears and rescues the 1st. They escape and the military regroups.

- Hunted down to a volcano, the military devises a plan to bury them underneath the fire, rock, and ash of the volcano. 

- In the conclusion, the plan succeeds and one of the Rodan's is set into the volcano and catches fie. Presumably not wanted to be alone, the 2nd Rodan joins its mate in the flames and they die together.

Kaiju Notes

- Rodan's powers are the ability to cause sonic booms by flapping its wings and also causing great damage by flying past things. In its first few appearances people are killed and vehicles destroyed just by the force of the giant creature flying past.

- As far as the creature itself, I honestly found it didn't make much of an impression at all. Besides the difficulty and clunkiness of having a flying creature onscreen in the 50's, Rodan leaves no major impressions.

- Meganulon is a much more interesting suit: claws and clearly a complex creation, if I had to choose one creature to have featured more (or even had as the main character) it would have been the much more interesting Meganulon.

To put it bluntly, Rodan is a very bad movie. It builds up a premise that has a lot of potential and wastes almost all of it. Meganulon is a demon from the gates of hell in the beginning of the movie, but when the earthquake happens and we shift focus to Rodan the movie begins to suffer. Making some initial good moves to establish Rodan as a danger to everyone around it despite not even being violent or angry, the major loss here was writing Meganulon out of the story entirely. Following Godzilla Raids Again I would assume that the idea of featuring two monsters fighting each other took hold here, but they squander it in a much bigger way than they did there. When we find out where Rodan came from (a giant egg), we also find out that in order to grow so large baby Rodan(s) just ate all of the Meganulons! What the actual fuck is that? There's not even a scene showing the swarm of Meganulon trying to fight Rodan off, just an off-screen explanation and with no more mention of Meganulon at all.

Now, I'm no kaiju movie writer (yet!) but I simply don't understand why you'd spend the first third of a movie focusing around a ferocious murderous bug monster only to have your giant flying dinosaur creature to simply eat them all offscreen. It makes no sense at all. When you factor in all of the additional work that had to be done to establish the new threat of Rodan (and earthquake, a plane, killing a couple, stealing cows, then there's a second one) it just makes the entire endeavor clunky. Especially when you had the great opportunity to have the larval Meganulon as a threat that could have evolved into the giant angry dragonfly monster that it was clearly conceived as. Everything else can function very similar, you just have a giant dragonfly instead of a flying dinosaur. You could even include the loss of the swarm of Meganulon, as maybe one eats all the others as they vie for being the Mega-Meganulon for the finale.

Speaking of failures, I have no idea what this movie is about. I read somewhere that Rodan was supposed to represent the threat that the Soviet Union posed to neighboring nations, but I don't see it. The only scene that comes remotely close to reflecting that is the scene of the fighter pilot encountering Rodan for the first time, initially thinking the dinosaur was some advanced new aircraft. But at no other point is anything even resembling arms race or invasion concerns even touched on. Rodan is a force of nature that mostly seems to accidentally harm people, so the military hunts it down and eventually succeeds in killing them. I could be missing something but I don't see how that serves as a metaphor for anything except possibly other natural disasters? Even if we take it as that, the military can't exactly shoot down a tsunami or a tornado so it still doesn't work.

Quite simply, Rodan is a mess. It's unnecessarily complicated, truly baffling narrative choices are made over and over, and it doesn't seem to be going for anything like an idea. Perhaps the kaiju genre is still truly finding its feet with releases like this and Godzilla Raids Again, but for me this film in particular just seems like an unforced error that failed to realize the potential of its own premise. I fully believe that in some alternate dimension there's a version of Rodan, probably called Meganulon instead, that is actually pretty awesome. A man can dream, at least. This will not be the last time we see the Main Man Rodan, so stay tuned for that. Hopefully his next appearance will be little more cohesive.

Next: Mothra!