Ginza Finally Gave Godzilla a Red Carpet
On Monday night a red carpet was laid down the length of the old elevated expressway that cuts through Ginza, built decades ago over a filled-in canal, and for the first time since 1954 a Godzilla film was allowed to arrive at the one neighbourhood the character has always treated as home.
The arrival event for Godzilla -0.0 ran along that stretch of road rather than the usual hotel ballroom or studio backlot, with the cast — Minami Hamabe, Masami Nagasawa and Ryunosuke Kamiki among them — walking a few hundred metres past the exact kind of department-store intersection and rail bridge that Godzilla has been flattening on screen for seventy-odd years, lit for one night the way a soundstage usually fakes it. A premiere has never been staged there before. The studios that own the monster have always, understandably, preferred its destruction stay safely inside the model shop.
Ginza earned that status by accident of geography and then kept it by seventy years of repetition: the 1954 original sent the creature up from Tokyo Bay through exactly this grid of department stores and rail bridges, and every sequel since has paid some kind of visual tax to that same route, whether or not the story actually needed it to. A monster that destroys the same six blocks for seven decades isn't really destroying them anymore. It's visiting, the way a regular returns to a bar that long ago stopped charging him for the damage.
What the premiere didn't need to tell anyone is what the film apparently did to the people who had already seen it: one of its cast said plainly that he hadn't been able to eat properly for two days after watching it, the kind of sentence that means more about a dark room's power than any number from a box-office report filed the same week. A film can be reviewed in adjectives or it can be reviewed in what it does to somebody's appetite. The second kind is harder to fake.
By midnight the carpet had been rolled up and the expressway was just a road with cars on it again, carrying the ordinary traffic of a Tuesday over the same ground a sixty-metre lizard has been allowed to wreck, on screen, since before most of the people driving over it were born.