Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a 1971 Japanese kaiju film directed by Yoshimitsu Banno, co-written by Banno and Takeshi Kimura, and produced and distributed by Toho Co., Ltd. It is the 11th film in the Godzilla franchise, and features the fictional monster characters Godzilla and Hedorah. The film stars Akira Yamauchi, Toshie Kimura, and Hiroyuki Kawase, with special effects by Teruyoshi Nakano, and features Haruo Nakajima as Godzilla and Kenpachiro Satsuma as Hedorah. Satsuma would go on to portray Godzilla in later Godzilla films.
Godzilla vs. Hedorah features an environmentalist message, with the malevolent Hedorah being spawned from pollution.
via Wikipedia
The rest of the early Godzilla movies (including this one) are fights between Godzilla and other monsters from various backgrounds. As referenced from the above quote, this one has an environmental ethics take on the monster that fights Godzilla.
Hedorah is a monster that feeds on pollution, it starts off as a fairly small sea-going creature, but quickly becomes larger as it feeds off the smoke and garbage it finds in the sea around Japan. The rest of the movie carries on in traditional Godzilla fashion, with multiple fights between the two monsters. However, Hedorah is now more powerful than Godzilla due to the huge amounts of pollution it has now consumed.
A small group of humans figure out that electrifying Hedorah, and therefore drying it out, will weaken it. So they build a couple of towers directly in the path of the fighting duo which happens to be on Mount Fuji. This is the epic fight scene of the movie, so I won’t spoil it for you, but there are clips of it on Youtube if you’re so inclined.
At this point in the Godzilla movies the creators have taken to given the monsters an ethical spin, making Godzilla the hero, and humans the cause of most of his troubles (humans created the pollution that created and fed Hedorah), most of those troubles being alien space creatures brought about human actions. While that doesn’t necessarily take over the entirety of the movie it is there in the background the entire time.
I still love watching Godzilla fight, I still enjoy the fight scenes between the two monsters, and I still enjoy the humans being mostly ignorant with a few others knowing exactly what’s going on and how to fix it. It’s still good.
Fellowship of Filming(s) 