Godzilla is back with a new style, but classic sensibilities.
Shin Godzilla will have a limited North American theatrical engagement on October 11–18.
Godzilla movies have changed a lot over the years. Shin Godzilla, the 31st Godzilla film (and the 29th by original Gojira production house Toho Pictures), has more in common with the original than the most recent before it, Gareth Edwards’ 2014 movie titled simply Godzilla. That’s definitely a good thing.
The original 1954 Godzilla, though primitive, still holds up for its poignant allegory of nuclear armament and the personal responsibility of those involved with the creation of the nuclear bomb. The 2014 Godzilla was a dopey action flick that had no deeper meaning or metaphor beyond typical brainless schlock about family and duty.
If your main complaint with the 2014 Godzilla was the monster’s lack of screentime, you won’t be much happier with Shin Godzilla. But if your chief criticisms of the last Godzilla movie were its nonsensical plot, cardboard characters and lack of any reasonable motivation for all involved, then Shin Godzilla might be more your flavor of giant monster movie.
Shin Godzilla is far from perfect. Godzilla itself, now all-CG, looks fine in most scenes, but the effects don’t always hold up, particularly in close-ups. The titular creature stretches its tail and lumbers from the ocean depths off the coast of Tokyo extremely early in the movie, but he does so in infant form. He looks like a komodo dragon with googly eyes and two big, bloody ballsacks for a neck. It’s both gross (goopy blood sloshes from his ballsack neck gills with every plodding step) and extremely silly, and more than a little disappointing.
But this is a new origin story, and co-directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi (both well known for their work on the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, among other things) had their own fun with Shin Godzilla. This newest incarnation quickly begins mutating, scientists and politicians across Japan breathlessly tracking its progress through multiple forms. Before long Godzilla has sprouted massive legs, doubled in size and begun shooting devastating purple laser beams of death from its back, tail and mouth (no joke). It’s really something to see.
At the same time, this Godzilla hews more closely to the creatures of old in the ways it looks and moves than the more lithe and mobile versions from more recent (particularly Western) versions. You won’t see Shin Godzilla’s monster sprinting between skyscrapers like a charging T-Rex as the version in the 1998 Mathew Broderick and Jean Reno movie did. In Shin Godzilla, Gojira shambles a slow -- and overwhelmingly destructive -- path through Tokyo and beyond. Even the music harks back to the classics -- though much of it was composed fresh by Shiro Sagisu, who also composed for Evangelion, Shin also reuses old tracks composed for previous films by Akira Ifukube. The result is an eclectic score that perfectly matches the film’s dual old and new sensibilities.
But unfortunately for those who complain when the creature gets less screentime than its human co-stars, Godzilla’s physical presence in Shin Godzilla is often felt in the form of tension and a ticking clock more than actually witnessed. He actually spends much of the movie -- over two weeks in the film’s timeline -- hibernating in the middle of Tokyo while he recharges his back lasers. This leaves plenty of room for the bulk of the film’s action: straight up bureaucracy.
Although Shin Godzilla doesn’t have the luxury of dwelling inside its characters’ heads for quite as long as much of Anno and Higuchi’s previous work (particularly Evangelion), the movie spends an unprecedented amount of screentime portraying the struggles of the splintered and confused Japanese government as it attempts to respond to a catastrophe of Godzilla’s size.
From the earliest scenes, when Japan’s Prime Minister is informed of a mysterious leak in the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line tunnel, to the final moments, when two characters ruminate on their future political careers, Shin Godzilla is concerned chiefly with chiefs, ministers and secretaries and aides to the chiefs and ministers. At first I found it confusing that the movie introduces every single character -- anyone who speaks even a word -- with on-screen text identifying their name and title, like a Wes Anderson credits sequence on fast forward. I eventually realized it’s part of the joke; Shin Godzilla is suffuse with extremely dry humor, much of which unfortunately won’t land for Western viewers who will struggle to read two sets of subtitles in almost every scene.
Star Hiroki Hasegawa plays Rando Yaguchi, Japan’s Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary (yes, I had to look that up). Fast cuts and a unique found footage-inspired shooting style portray his ascension through the ranks as various other members of government fall victim to the monster or prove ineffectual, and through it all he remains diplomatic, losing his temper but once (and only to have a bottle of water shoved into his hand and be told to calm down). Meanwhile Yutaka Takenouchi plays Hideki Akasaka, the stoic primary aide to the prime minister, and Satomi Ishihara portrays Kayoko Ann Patterson, “Special Envoy for the President of the United States.”
Ishihara proves least believable in her role as middle-woman between Japan and the US, not because she’s a young woman, but because her English speech is so unnatural-sounding (something the actress said last year she was “frustrat[ed]” by during shooting). But it’s worth it for her great intro partway through the film, where she deftly gets the slightly hapless Yaguchi on her side and admits that she’s dressed in a casual skirt and jacket because she rushed to the crisis zone straight from a party. “Where’s [a] Zara?” she asks in English.
Ultimately all the bureaucracy and carnage combine to give Shin Godzilla’s Japan a chance to reclaim its agency in a world in which it still hasn’t recovered totally from World War II. Post-war seems to stretch into eternity for Japan, one character laments late in the film, and officials of all rank are portrayed throughout the movie as frustrated, befuddled and hamstrung by international pressures and regulations. They even face the threat of the U.S. dropping a third nuclear bomb on Japanese soil, various officials wrestling with what it would mean to sanction such an action and whether impending doom under Godzilla’s scaly feet would be preferable.
You can view that as a heavy-handed overstating of the metaphor, considering Godzilla is basically itself a walking 100-story nuke, but I choose to see it as a tribute to the original, whose characters struggled with similar questions -- not to mention a welcome thematic layer for a franchise that’s lost much of its depth over the years.
While the 2014 Gareth Edwards Godzilla contains clues that kaiju as a genre exists in its world, in Shin Godzilla the only hints to the creature’s existence come from the research of an eccentric dead scientist who obviously no one listened to until it was too late. Nevertheless his notes spell out the creature’s name: Godzilla, or “Gojira” as the Japanese characters apparently spell out.
The name of this film, Shin Godzilla, was chosen by Anno, Executive Producer Akihiro Yamaguchi has been quoted as saying. The “Shin” can apparently be translated a variety of ways: as “new,” “true,” and “god.” I think the film’s greatest strength and its biggest contribution to the Godzilla legacy is its portrayal of the creature as a true force of overwhelming destruction. The mighty Gojira, who stands stalwart and tall, withstanding everything the militaries of man can throw at it, is “truly a god incarnate,” as Ishihara’s character mutters despairingly. And Shin Godzilla does him justice with narrative depth and style befitting the classics.
The Verdict
Shin Godzilla provides a new origin for the legendary kaiju, establishing its own unique style while taking inspiration from the classics in all the right ways. Some fans might be disappointed by the monster’s lack of screentime or confused by the complex bureaucracies at the film’s center, but it all comes together by the end.
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