Godzilla is a legendary Japanese cinematic character, a huge lizard that destroys cities and is inextricably linked to the topic of nuclear weapons testing. More than a dozen films have been shot with him, including a completely new Hollywood action movie that was released in 2014.
Japanese Godzilla film series
The first film about Godzilla appeared in 1954, and since then almost three dozen films have been released, not counting the series of television series about the mutant lizard. These films were filmed mainly in Japan and the surrounding region, in the role of Godzilla himself, as a rule, a person in a special suit, a movable doll or even a special controlled robot acted. The first shooting using computer effects took place in 1989 - and since then the monster has looked more and more realistic. Despite the general idea, from film to film, Godzilla's appearance and proportions changed - if in the first films he was fifty meters, judging by the surrounding objects, then by 2004 he had reached a hundred meters and became significantly more massive.
Fans of the original Japanese series received the 1998 American remake very poorly, as they felt that the film had distorted the original idea too much.
Godzilla, 1998
The first American film about Godzilla was filmed in New York (over two weeks), Los Angeles and Hawaii. One of the features of the film is that the soldiers in the frames are mostly real military personnel, who were used for the most realistic combat scenes. For the scene of the murder of Godzilla, an image of a real combat pilot in the cockpit of an active fighter was used. But Godzilla himself in this film is entirely computer, because in the plot he is a mutant iguana, and therefore moves completely like a reptile. This film was notable for the huge scale of the shooting scenes (the tree used to build the scenery would be enough for fifty houses), large-scale props (for example, two thousand dummy fish were specially created for the scene in the park) and complex movable structures (for the movement of machines from earthquakes more than twenty devices were used in the scene of Godzilla's entrance to New York).
Godzilla, 2014
The new incarnation of Godzilla appeared for the sixtieth anniversary of the franchise, and the director tried to do everything to preserve the original image of the lizard in his film. He compared all previous films with this character among themselves and recreated an image that is in no way similar to the previous Hollywood image. One of the conditions for filming from the Japanese side was the work on the monster using the old technology, therefore, despite the entire amount of computer processing, the movements of Godzilla are the movements of a living person in a suit with sensors.
The film was filmed in Canada - Vancouver, Richmond and various locations in British Columbia. Three real aircraft carriers were used for filming. Additional filming took place in Honolulu, Hawaii for nuclear test scenes and beach shots.
