Godzilla: King of Kaiju
Screening Dates
  • October 28, 2023 9:00

“Fast-paced and light in tone, and builds to a riveting race-against-time finale.”

Janus Films

A creative changeup and tightening of studio purse strings makes this seventh Godzilla entry something of an inflection point in the series. Originally destined to be a vehicle for King Kong (still under license from RKO), the movie ended up in the Godzilla department with a crew carried over from that aborted project. At the helm was Fukuda Jun, a reliable, resourceful genre director who would go on to make four additional entries in the series. Ebirah, set on the made-up island of Letchi (a cost-saving measure that eliminated model cities), sees Godzilla and Mothra electro-shocked out of slumber by a group of castaways, who enlist the kaiju to do battle with a giant crustacean and a terrorist organization harvesting atomic warfare. The music, a one-eighty from Ifukube’s iconic score, features ​’60s surf rock and electric-guitar riffs. Godzilla’s evolution into a more human-resembling hero reaches maturity here.

In Japanese with English subtitles

Media