Godzilla

Out of all the Godzilla re-edits (I'm not even sure how many there are, because there are 30+ original films and who knows how many different international markets all those films could be altered for), this Italian one - which is sometimes called Cozzilla - might be the strangest. I do much prefer that title to saying 1977's Godzilla. The re-edit was helmed by a man named Luigi Cozzi, so it's just a perfect alternate title.

This is probably somewhat well-known, at least among Godzilla fans, because it sort of colorizes footage from both the original Godzilla (1954) and the well-known American re-edit from 1956: Godzilla, King of the Monsters!. I say sort of because it's pretty lazily done, for the most part. Most of the shots are just tinted with one to three colors, so it really doesn't look all that more impressive than old black-and-white movies that would say have blue tints for the nighttime scenes and yellow tints for the brightly lit scenes, and so on.

There's something that initially sounds neat about watching the first Godzilla in color, as that one was one of only two filmed in black-and-white, but the actual colorizing process feels a bit half-hearted, outside a few striking moments here and there.

The other big change is getting the subtext from the original Godzilla and making it text. The film opens with America dropping nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, and Cozzilla makes the bold choice to include distressing archival footage of the attacks' victims. Later on, I think the same footage (or very similar footage) is used to show the victims - direct or metaphorical - of Godzilla's attack. It feels in poor taste, but I guess the original Godzilla was always making that comparison, albeit without needing to revert to shocking footage and making it more nuanced subtext. But it's something I will probably remember about Cozzilla; it's gutsy, for better or worse.

The final change is more obvious: most of the dialogue is now in Italian.

The King of the Monsters! Re-edit was kind of worth watching for fans, but this one's a little harder to recommend. I'll be fascinated by just about anything Godzilla-related, so I can't say I hated watching it, despite it offering little that felt new or striking. But then again, I am kind of crazy when it comes to this franchise, so if you've read this far, don't listen to me and probably don't watch this.