Ροντάν: Ο Δράκος του Qiu Shu

Josh Lewis3.0

After the success of Godzilla, Ishirō Honda reunited with FX wizard Eiji Tsuburaya and composer Akira Ifukube to give it another go with a new monster and a slightly sillier, more colorful style that has less of the dark, haunting nuclear holocaust mood of the original and more of a UFO-chasing adventure tone. Despite that shift, this still does have a lot of the basic appeal: slow-burn monster movie mystery, terrific analog creature work/miniatures, bombastic score, lots of environmental and military anxiety-loaded imagery. The scientist and military official jargon downtime doesn’t quite work as well when there’s less anti-war moral crisis being worked through and more plot exposition, but I did enjoy the spooky mining tunnel set pieces early on, LOVED the flashback to the safety engineer being made to remember his surreal terror of waking up inside the big bird nest (where the giant larva insects you think could be the antagonists are just good for the real one), and the Top Gun jet dogfighting with the bird as it destroys an entire city with super sonic wing flapping is pretty fun. The ending is quite sad too, almost King Kong-esque: Rodan, upon seeing his buddy fall into lava and burn to death, sets himself on fire with lava and burns to death as our human onlookers bear horrible witness. A real ride or die homie.Full discussion on ep 441 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Joachim Andersson4.0

I always forget that Rodan is a quite serious movie, lots of people die on screen and I accuse the goofier later guest appearances of being responsible of that. No, this is more in the tone of the original Gojira (though nowhere near as bleak) but it compensates with an ending that is just so heartachingly sad. And some really good sfx.

matt lynch3.5

very amusingly modern, with its slow burn reveal of the monster, a twist-heavy script (you mean the giant grubs these miners dug up are just food for something even bigger? say, what do you think's in that enormous egg?) and endless scenes of military and scientific "experts" explaining stuff to each other before you can get to the good parts. as a step forward for Toho's miniature effects, though, this can't be dismissed. they're much more elaborate, and although this doesn't have GODZILLA's stark, grainy texture, the color added to the gorgeous, bright academy ratio photography lends a level of detail that wasn't quite present in that film's inky black & white. Honda crowds unfussy setups and dolly shots with harsh angled lines, far more compositionally dense than the rest of his kaiju work, which was from here on out always in scope, and where i think he sometimes struggled to fill the frame even given the guys in rubber suits.