Shin Godzilla (2016)

directed by Shinji Higuchi, Hideaki Anno

Japan

121 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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In 2016, this was the first Godzilla movie I ever watched. I'm wondering if that decision is what led to me appreciating Godzilla on its own merits instead of having to go through the process of "hey, this goofy rubber monster stuff I watched as bad dubs on TV when I was a kid is actually good" to rediscover Godzilla like a lot of people do. A recent podcast episode that some people I know in meatspace put together made me want to revisit it, since I realized it had been a couple of years since my last rewatch, and I have to say I think this is one of my favorite Godzilla movies now.

Every time I rewatch this I feel like Higuchi and Anno are doing something with this movie that I understand on a subconscious level but that my brain can't fully parse. There's so many layers to it. It's a Godzilla movie, right? It's about Godzilla. But actually, it's about the inability of the Japanese government to respond to a natural disaster and the resultant loss of life and property. But actually, it's about nuclear waste dumping. But actually, it's about foreign relations. But actually, it's about the fact that humanity might have grown too big for its britches, that the immensity of the response we mount to Godzilla may be an indication that we've doomed ourselves to a perpetual arms race through which more and more horrifying weapons are brought into existence with no way to ever stop it until we all die. We could choose to stop it, of course, but will we?

But actually, it's about Godzilla, because Godzilla is about all of those things.

The entire first half of this movie is almost really funny. The stark contrast between humans running from boardroom to boardroom, volleying decisions around from government official to government official, and the actual on-the-ground reality of a giant monster destroying Tokyo is unavoidably comical. It only gets worse the more Shin evolves: eventually you have this devil-creature who looks like the most evil thing ever born inexorably making its way through the city while shooting lasers out of its back, and you still have to have boardroom meetings about it. None of the human characters are likeable in an individual sense (except, maybe, Patterson; she starts out looking vain and power-hungry, but she does eventually show that she really seems to have a personal connection to what she's trying to protect that goes beyond politics). All of them feel more like titles than people. You get the sense that some - maybe even a lot - of them are trying very hard to do what they believe is right, and that fact is the only shred of optimism the movie leaves us with, but for the most part, even the ones who do genuinely want to unite and help have to put up with bureaucratic labyrinths, if not within their own country, then with other country's governments.

And then there's the big sea creature who is sick and in constant pain from eating radioactive garbage. It's wandered onto land in a place that's not safe for it. It's bigger than us, and much more powerful than us, but it doesn't hate us. It doesn't want to hurt us. It doesn't want anything other than to not be in pain anymore. I can't conceive of a way you could find Shin scary. The whole "man is the real monster" thing gets bandied about all the time in these movies, but this is one of the first times I've really understood it: is it not horrifying that we have the ability to bring skyscrapers down upon a hurt and confused animal, and to freeze its blood? Hell, was it not horrifying 70 years ago that we (briefly, anyway) had the ability to rip it apart at the atomic level? I won't argue whether every effort to kill Godzilla has been the "right" decision or not, but wouldn't we mourn at least a little for the beauty of a man-eating tiger after it had been shot?

Watching Minus One and this movie in quick succession has made me so excited about the state of Godzilla. We can do so much more with it now. I am at least a little bit an annoying Showa purist, it doesn't get much better than Godzilla '54 to me, but the world has changed so much and there are so many new people around now who have lived with Godzilla their whole lives and are ready to bring their own skills and perspectives to the table. It's riveting! To have seen how this whole thing has grown and changed over the last 70 years, and to know it's got a vibrant future.

Happy Birthday Godzilla!

Here's to the next 70 years. Personally, I would love nothing more than to live as long as possible but still not see the end of the Godzilla series within my lifetime.

Like many people, I'm going to be seeing Godzilla Minus One this weekend. But I'm doing it while fully conscious that decisions by Toho - extremely deliberate decisions - regarding the international distribution of Minus One have led to huge swaths of the world having no way to see this movie in theaters. Toho is blatantly favoring North America (and the UK, to a lesser extent) because they know North American fans are where the money is. Putting profits over what people want from them, they ignore fans in other parts of Asia. One Twitter user has been very vocal about this situation ever since the first release of Minus One, and I won't name names since he's understandably tired of being dragged into debates about it, but you can find his posts about the matter on the r/godzilla subreddit as well.

I'm saying all of this because I love Godzilla. I know that there are people elsewhere in the world who also love Godzilla and just want to watch as many Godzilla movies as possible. I'm not an economist so I'm not going to get on here and pretend to advise Japan's largest film studio about distribution tactics, but it seems frankly stupid to be this stubborn about Minus One. They did this last year and now they're doing it all over again. Keeping Minus One out of theaters isn't going to stop anyone from watching it - they're just going to do it through avenues that Toho won't profit off of, which is the opposite of what they want. And yet this keeps happening. With the announcement that a new Godzilla movie has been greenlit, I sincerely hope Toho will make a change next time.

If you're celebrating 70 years of Godzilla this month (like I am), I would encourage you to celebrate 70 years of Godzilla, not Toho. They're a corporation just like any other, and are going to continue to make preposterous business decisions that don't reflect what fans really want out of them. Celebrate the incredibly talented people who have brought us seven decades of Godzilla movies. Celebrate the staff who've worked for Toho as artists and craftspeople - not the ones trying to decide who can and can't watch the movies. Celebrate the complexity of Godzilla's story and the ways it has been interpreted. Celebrate the beautiful art that comes out of every single Godzilla movie. Don't celebrate a corporation that doesn't care about the same things as you.

(I most certainly have some Godzilla '54 posts up on my other blog.)