Rodan as Eco-Film

Some may say that Rodan (1956) could be defined as an eco-film only if the American opening is included to connect the birth of Rodan with radiation exposure. From our perspective, however, the original Japanese version also raises environmental concerns, this time associated with the more everyday eco-disasters that are a product of the mining industries. Keeping in mind that Inoshiro Honda, the director of Rodan, was an assistant to Kajiro Yamamoto, who made documentary-styled films that were a huge influence on Akira Kurosawa as well as the Japanese documentary movement, might provide insight into this reading. Yamamoto is responsible for documentaries such as Horse, for example, a neo-realist film about horse-breeding shot on location in wintry, difficult terrain, a setting and subject that, perhaps, link it with the environmental cinema movement.

The American version of Rodan opens with stock footage from several U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing. The first, “Mission Gigantic,” takes place “in the faraway Pacific on a tiny island atoll, miles away from inhabited land” and watched “from a battleship in the remote Pacific from which all shipping has been banned. During the mission, we see American sailors looking at dials. “Minus 15 seconds” they say, and we see and explosion at zero. Buildings disintegrate. Destruction is “total and complete.” Shock waves are felt ten thousands miles away, and a mushroom cloud erupts. This is “an interesting case of inversion” according to Joanne Bernardi.

Another test is attempted from the air to explode ships at sea. The explosion is again on target, and “the kill is complete.”  But the narrator wonders, what has this “destruction done to mother earth?” “Can the human race continue to deliver these staggering blows without arousing somewhere in the depths of Earth a reaction, a counter attack, a horror still undreamed of? There are persons in the Japanese islands who believe that horror has already been seen.”

Then the scene changes to Japan and a village supported by mining where horror and uneasiness are in the air, illustrating the presumed product of atomic testing, but in this original section of the film, mining is the cause of the “horror,” not radiation.  The miners are going too deep in mine number 8, and conditions are becoming dangerous. The floor is creeping because there is too much pressure and two meters of water is rising there. We see dead men in the water, but they are nearly hacked to pieces, not drowned, slaughtered as if they had been attacked by an animal. Although they blame a colleague he had fought with, they can’t find the co-worker’s body. More are dead, and they don’t yet know why.

Then we see the giant insect. It’s an angry caterpillar that can’t be killed with ordinary bullets. They try military weapons, but walls collapse inside the mine due to an earthquake. The Earthquake Institute near the mine inspects the area of the volcano. The suggestion is that Rodan is a prehistoric insect that once roamed the earth. But Rodan transforms from a worm into a giant flying insect that can destroy planes: He is giant, fast, and carnivorous, and belongs to an extinct species whose eggs were hermetically sealed by the volcanic eruption until water from the mine tunnels reached the egg and insect larvae.  Rodan also has a mate. The two attack bridges and defend themselves against air attacks. To protect their community, humanity must destroy the pair with an erupting volcano and flames.

Although the film seems to provide only natural causes for the rise of Rodan, the drive for resources from mining serves as the catalyst for unsealing the egg and releasing the enormous insect from his grave. Instead of radiation, mining is the source of the “horror.”