The film that spawned a genre and innumerable spinoffs. Despite the campy reputation, this is a serious film that depicts a community coming together to defeat the terrifying spectre of nuclear holocaust. It is a big budget (five times that of the typical Japanese production at the time) reckoning with the horrors of Hiroshima that grounds it self in documentary-like visuals. Cineteca di Bologna scholar Anthony Meneghelli comments that the “most unforgettable character in the film, aside from the monster, is Dr. Serizawa, who unwittingly discovers a device that destroys oxygen (today we would call it an “oxygen depletion system” that got out of hand). His torment when faced with the deadly symbiosis between science and mass destruction remains, in my view, more convincing than the one displayed by Oppenheimer in Nolan’s excellent film.” Event Url