GOJIRA (GODZILLA) (1954)
Released just nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this is Japan’s post-war trauma made flesh: the ultimate monster, born of nuclear fire, impossible to outrun, indifferent to human existence.
This is the film as director Ishirō Honda intended. Stripped of the dubbed dialogue and additional footage which softened it for US audiences, the original cut is something far darker – what happens when humanity’s hubris comes back to bight? A question so powerful, it spawned an ongoing global franchise that refuses to die, remaining as relevant as ever.
With introduction by Professor Danielle Celermajer, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, and author of Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future (2021).
Directed by Ishirō Honda, Japan, 1954, 96 min, M
Starring: Akira Takarada, Momoko Kōchi, Akihiko Hirata, Takashi Shimura
In Japanese with English subtitles.
WITH INTRODUCTION BY
Danielle Celermajer
Danielle Celermajer is a Professor and Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Her research asks how politics, law and culture could be transformed so that they treat all Earth beings, not only human beings, as subjects of justice. Living through the Black Summer Fires and witnessing the mass killing of other animals and destruction of ecosystems, she described the new crime of our age as omnicide and wrote Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future (2021). Her two latest books, Institutionalising Multispecies Justice (2025) and Multispecies Climate Justice, Disasters and Responsibility (2026) call for radical institutional transformation in the face of the polycrisis.
We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation - the custodians of the country on which we meet - and acknowledge their Elders, past and present.
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