Rodan (1956)

Rodan is the third movie in the family of Godzilla movies and the first to be filmed in color. I admit to being hesitant about watching a stand alone movie for this particular Kaiju. He'd never impressed me in the movies I've seen him co-starring in. Fortunately, my fears were unfounded. I found Rodan to be quite entertaining.

The movie starts with miners being violently killed in a dark, flooded cave. It is creepy and claustrophobic. Up out of the ground come giant killer dragonfly larvae. Much of the first part of the film is people hunting them down and attempting to kill them. Little did they know that what eats the giant insects was going to be more problematic-like letting a tiger in the back door to chase the wolves away at the front door.

Rodan was much more impressive in this movie than subsequent ones. He was huge, mobile, and destructive. Yes, you can see the wires at times if you look closely, but this old movie did quite a bit with the special effects and budget they had available to them. The miniatures were exquisite. Honda Ishiro and Ifukube Akira did a good job of bringing a giant flying dinosaur to life and making us care about him when by all rights we shouldn't.

Many times the human aspect of these movies fails. This time there was a sense of urgency and pathos from the beginning to the end. It also helped that this movie came before subsequent campy monster romps. As with Godzilla, by the end of the movie, even the human characters begin to feel sympathy for the great beasts.

Though around 65 years old I thought Rodan held up pretty well. He's now in my top three early Toho movies.

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