Shin Godzilla (2016)

directed by Hideaki Anno

Japan

120 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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The first time I watched this, I hadn't seen any Godzilla movies, and I was largely unaware of anything having to do with kaiju beyond the most basic stuff. Since then, I've seen every Godzilla movie (well, all the Japanese ones, anyway) and got myself a damn fine Godzilla tattoo for good measure. So I was curious about how my feelings on this movie would change now that I have more context for it.

Godzilla is the main character of this. And I know that talking about Godzilla in a movie that he stars in might seem redundant, but really, enough cannot be said about the way Hideaki Anno handles the king of the monsters and his place in the world. An old standard of the series is the Japanese military and government scrambling to assemble a plan of attack against Godzilla as soon as he makes landfall, and that set-up is taken to its extreme here: basically everything about this movie is bureaucracy; the vast majority of the running time is spent in various "situation rooms" with various military, government, and science personnel figuring out how to handle an unprecedented situation. But against the backdrop of this new, updated, and entirely more enigmatic Godzilla that Anno has created, it all just feels like farce. The contrast between a panel frantically discussing political fallout, defense strategies, and biology, and Godzilla himself coming ashore and just decimating Japan without care- that's what made this movie so interesting to me. The smallness of the human endeavor, the helplessness and futility of it. You can plan and think and scheme but then you pan out and there is Godzilla looming in the background.

I think that this is possibly the closest the series has yet come to making Godzilla into a true force of nature the way he is so frequently emphasized as being. Pretty much every Godzilla film does give him some kind of a personality (which isn't bad, where would we all be without him hamming it up in Son of Godzilla?) except for this one. He feels more than ever like some animal that lived at the bottom of the ocean and just happened to get really big. But in making him so seemingly mindless, in having him show total disregard for basically anything and assigning to him the instinctual actions of an animal, is this not the most powerful, most terrifying version of Godzilla? Because what could be more frightening than a manifestation of the sheer force of nature? No motive, no emotion, no thought- just the inherent chaos of life hauling itself up onto land and reminding us of our place.

Even though this Godzilla is primarily CGI, which might seem disheartening on the surface, I want to emphasize the work that was still put into crafting him the way it always has been since the inception of the series. Animatronics were constructed but not used, and the process of designing ShinGoji and all of his intricacies (I recommend looking at a source like WikiZilla because there is so much behind the scenes) was incredibly painstaking. Because motion-capture was used, a human is still behind ShinGoji, even if it's not literally a person in a suit.

It kind of takes two watches to realize the depth of the film. The first time around, you (or I) tend to see the humans first, because they're what the film spends the most time on visually. You're shown Tokyo being razed and burned and you're preoccupied with following everyone's different viewpoint about how to handle it and what that means for them personally and for Japan as a whole. The second time, I realize that there is something deeply nihilistic about this that reminds me very strongly of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which comes as no surprise. It's kind of an indictment of how people get caught up in drawing up rules and plans in times of crisis and ignore the real-world situation that's in front of them, but I think, more than that, it's about the absurdity and unpredictability of the universe. You have to put aside the government's schemes and plans and discover that they signal the existence of a chasm that no strategy can bridge. And I almost missed this due to the poor quality of the subs, but the film is left open-ended in that the American military explicitly says they will conduct a nuclear strike should Godzilla become active again. So we're left with that threat of annihilation hanging over the film, as it ever has.

Now that I've seen all the movies and I know the ins and outs, I can appreciate the continuity that this keeps with the rest of the franchise despite drastically redesigning it at the same time. The one thing I did have issue with enough to want to mention it is the music; not Akira Ifukube's iconic themes, those are always well-placed and I love them, but in certain scenes where Godzilla was stomping around, the background music is almost... wimpy? I do recognize it from Anno's other work, but it still doesn't fit with this film. I almost felt like I was watching something where the music had been muted for copyright reasons and replaced with unfitting, royalty-free music instead. Aside from Ifukube's originals, none of the music feels appropriate here.

I would have also liked to have seen more "on the ground" footage, which is hinted at in some scenes where the impact of Godzilla on social media in real time is shown. I think we've yet to have a truly up-to-the-minute Godzilla narrative that unfolds through social media, and that could be very interesting. But I really just love this movie the way it is. It is so dark and unyielding at the center, beyond simply being a monster movie. The exploration of how Godzilla works as an animal alongside what he represents philosophically is something that even the older films fail to juggle equally sometimes.