GKIDS/Shout!
There’s a tension at the heart of Godzilla as a franchise between the horrific origins of the character metaphor for the bomb dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the camp fun of watching giant monsters battle against detailed model backdrops.
Too often this tension plays out as a simple nostalgic return to one extreme or another.
What makes Shin Godzilla more than a great Godzilla movie is how it doesn’t simply return to the iconography and tone of Ishirō Honda’s 1954 original, but it expands and embellishes upon it.
It integrates the kaiju action and human plots perhaps even more deftly than the first film does and it has something new to say. For while the A Bomb and the 1954 version of Godzilla were horrors inflicted upon Japan, Shin Godzilla takes its cues from Fukushima where Japan’s own response was brought under massive scrutiny worldwide.
Toho is perfectly willing to license the character out but in their home-grown Godzilla films they aim for a delicate balance between the monster and the mascot. 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars was an epic spectacle that leaned hard into the coterie of monsters the franchise has developed over the years but the box office response was tepid and the character was shelved for over a decade while Toho negotiated with American studios.
After the worldwide success of 2014’s American Godzilla Toho contracted Hideaki Anno (the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Shinji Higuchi (a man who cut his teeth on Heisei era Godzilla and Gamera) to create a new Godzilla film for the Japanese market. The resulting film, Shin Godzilla, returns a true sense of horror and of the unexplained to the giant monster film and coupling it with social commentary and bureaucratic satire.
Shin Godzilla (2016) opens with the Coast Guard finding a deserted luxury yacht in Tokyo Bay flooded with blood. Just as scientists postulate that the yacht may have been attacked by a living creature, a shambling larvae monster begins to wreak havoc on the city. The creature feeds on radiation and mindlessly screams out in pain and the threat to Japan calls in both the American and Japanese military brass. Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa), leads the special international task force assembled to confront the monster, discovering that its existence was postulated by Goro Maki, a disgraced anti-nuclear biologist. Meanwhile, as political factions within the government struggle to coordinate a unified response, the team gives the abomination a name from Goto’s research: Godzilla.
As Godzilla’s rampage continues, the creature’s physiology and abilities evolve, showcasing new, more destructive powers, including the trademark atomic breath. Yaguchi’s team makes a breakthrough, realizing that Godzilla’s evolutionary process is ongoing and may have a weakness that can be exploited.
I adore how Anno and Higuchi strip away so much of the traditional tone of Godzilla films in order to actually create a sense of terror with this monster.
Typically even when Godzilla is presented as malevolent, there’s a lot of familiarity with him and how he behaves. Contrast that with the bug eyed larvae screaming and writhing in pain across a city block and you get a sense of how big a chance they took with the franchise here. This new monster is in agony at every moment and is killing scores of people just by existing. It brings an almost Lovecraftian edge to a very familiar set up.
Even when the creature assumes something akin to its traditional form it feels less like an animal mutated out of control and more like a living tumor– striated with red energy across a massive chest that looks skeletal. Shin Godzilla expertly interweaves CGI and practical model effects to get the most fully realized and credible version of the monster ever put on screen at a far smaller budget than the Godzilla films made in America.
That said, what really marks Shin Godzilla apart is the human segments which feel like, for the first time since The Smog Monster in the early 70’s, they’ve got something new to say. There’s plenty of nuclear terror and anti-American sentiment, but what I really found fascinating was how the characters are continually frustrated by well-intentioned bureaucrats who simply cannot adapt to the emergency before their eyes.
This is a film made for the Japanese domestic market and it speaks to concerns about defense, preparedness, and Japanese sovereignty in a world under the Pax Americana. It also speaks to how people become their own worst enemies, and how the social systems designed to protect us can end destroy us if the people running them conflate the letter of regulation with the intent.
Steelbook extras include Extras include Making Of, Deleted Scenes, Outtakes, News Reels, Pre-Visual Outtakes, Teasers and Trailers.
Highly Recommended.
