Summary
When an immense mysterious evolutionarily advanced creature emerges from the sea and begins walking to Tokyo, the government and people of Japan must band together to save their country and the world.
My Viewing
As much as I like the idea of Godzilla the character, the movies he is featured in are not always my fave. For one, they can be a little slow. Godzilla even, as a large lumbering creature, is a little slow. They can also just be monster slug fests that feel like they have more in common with an episode of The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers than a high budget special effects blockbuster.
“Shin Godzilla” is an example of Godzilla at its best and if you have never seen a Godzilla movie or don’t know anything about him, this film is where I would recommend you start and I will try and review it with you in mind.
My Thoughts
One of the first things that a new viewer to Godzilla will notice is the way that the story develops slowly and remains from the perspective of the humans. In an American monster film the movie is an excuse to see a big monster do a lot of cool stuff in great cgi action sequences. In this film, Godzilla is more of an excuse to look at sociological problems within a culture.
This is to a large extent on the Japanese focus of the film. It isn’t really about any one person and the parts which tend toward the more traditionally western protagonist driven hero style movie are actually the weakest parts of the film. That is because no one person is the protagonist. Japan is.
You get hints of this in movies like “Independence Day” but they get swallowed up in giving their celebrities a lot of screen time instead of spreading it around more evenly amongst the myriad of protagonists necessary to tackle a problem of this scale.
“Shin Godzilla” does all sorts of things that show respect for the past but a need for the new ideas of the future even as it mirrors those social movements among the leaders of the Japanese government.
For one, the music consistently has this throwback horn and war drum theme that draws on the original “Godzilla / Gojira (1954),” as well as shooting similar shots from the original but building on it in entirely unique ways. That isn’t the only way this film bows to its predecessors.
Also, you can’t watch this film and not draw correlations between the movements of the CG Godzilla and the old Rubber-Suit Godzilla. The CG wobbles like a rubber suit yet never feels silly because it is so deadly, yet in the wide shots, Godzilla barely seems to be moving at all. He just plods forward. He doesn’t move like an out of control animal. He doesn’t move like a dinosaur.
He moves like fate. Inevitable.
Because of how large scale the threat is, in “Shin Godzilla,” everyone is the hero. It’s the way we work as people together that makes the difference and that difference is felt through the direction. The way groups are dressed and blocked, the editing together of sequences of discussion with action, and even the way settings change and attitudes are mirrored by body language are all telling a story about disparate groups of people who don’t always work well together finding a way to value each other and be the best versions of themselves they can be.
The reason this all works so well is because the battle against Godzilla is not just a tactical one. The question of how we go about getting rid of him is certainly a question but the question underneath it all is a more philosophical ideological strategic question. Are we willing to do what it takes to win or will we sit down and die in apparent despair.
This is another thing about “Shin Godzilla” that stands out from American monster films. The scares are not personal scares. There are no moments of personal tension where a velociraptor waits around the corner and you have to find a way out of the room without drawing attention. There isn’t even the supernatural dread of “Hereditary” or “The VVitch”) where it is the hidden malevolence in the world that is frightening. In Godzilla the dread is the fear of annihilation. It is existential. It is about the species facing an extinction event.
For many younger (40 and under) viewers the imagery in this film will seem very upfront and obvious. It is a film about massive environmental changes to the way we live resulting from terrible decisions by the governments of the past. It is about taking our place as the leaders and changers of the world around us that we need to be. There is a youthful hope in this film that you don’t see often. That zeal actually rubs off on the older members of the government as well, allowing them to make decisions they would never have made before. Bold moral choices.
This theme is what takes “Shin Godzilla” from an interesting monster film to true transcendent social commentary in the way that the original “Godzilla” must have felt to the country that suffered the wiping of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, almost from existence. It understands that we face the same thing in our lives and that we, like the characters in this film, need to get serious about doing what humans do well when they are unified. Overcoming long odds and solving problems in big bold sacrificial ways.
The reason that this film succeeds so well is that it recognizes the scope and scale of the problems the world is facing and acknowledges that it is greater than the nuclear threat of so many years ago.
It is a Godzilla sized problem which is why a new adaptation recaptures the original’s essence so well.
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