Shin Godzilla, newly released on home video, does something that I never really expected to see happen in a Godzilla movie ever again: It makes Godzilla scary.
And, I mean, he should be, right? The Godzilla that breached the surface of the ocean off Odo Island back in 1954 was never meant to be some adorable mascot. It was a hideous, inhuman force of nature, the wrath of the nuclear bomb given flesh and a temper. Even today, when the special effects available to director Ishiro Honda in 1954 have been imitated and parodied and left long in the dust by technology, the original Gojira’s footage of jam-packed hospitals, devastated lands and cities, and wailing, ruined people remains haunting.
But that’s an exception. None of the imitations spawned by Gojira’s success (like Rodan) packed near the same punch, and pretty soon the big lizard was getting trotted out for rubber-suited punch-ups with everyone from King Kong to King Ghidorah to King Kong-but-this-time-it’s-a-robot. There have been attempts made by both Japanese and American studios to restore Godzilla to his original purpose as a true ‘monster’, but none of them have really taken.
Shin Godzilla? It just might take.
(Sidenote: On the American end of things, they missed this mark in two different ways. Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla failed because Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla is a piece of shit that couldn’t be bothered to make Godzilla look like Godzilla. Gareth Edwards’ recent, deeply underrated Godzilla does an extraordinary job restoring a sense of awe and majesty to the king of all monsters, but by the end of the film, Godzilla is again positioned as a, if not heroic, then at least protective force.)
So how did co-directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi (Anno also wrote the screenplay) do it? From a narrative perspective, Shin Godzilla is following the kaiju playbook pretty straight. There are some minor disturbances on an otherwise peaceful day, Godzilla shows up and wrecks shit, leaves, everyone scrambles to figure out what the hell just happened, Godzilla comes back, more shit is wrecked, and then you sort of toggle back and forth between shit being wrecked and people grappling with the enormity and thoroughness with which said shit was wrecked, until some bright sparks figure out how to stop Godzilla (until it’s sequel time).
Your success when it comes to playing with this formula is going to depend on execution, and that’s where Anno and Higuchi really shine. They know you know how this sort of thing plays out, so rather than try and mess with proven success by adding layers of plot and convolutions, they focus on hitting the beats they need to hit and making them stick.
A big part of they succeed is in how they’ve reconceived Godzilla himself. Godzilla in Shin Godzilla is…well…he’s really fucking weird.
And that’s perfect! It’s a giant, mutant, radioactive-lizard thing that spews fire and likes to punt buildings. The conceit to Shin Godzilla’s reimagining of the monster is that Godzilla is in a near-constant state of mutation, able to alter himself physically to suit whatever environment he’s in-
(Sidenote: This allows the filmmakers to address the most common criticism of Godzilla’s design by people on the Internet with, just, with way too much time on their hands, and also Ray Harryhausen. The critique goes that no creature as big as Godzilla could possibly walk on land on two legs. In Shin Godzilla, the humans themselves make this observation, only to be totally thrown when Godzilla does, in fact, come on land.)
-and the various forms Godzilla takes are strange and awkward and goofy…and legitimately unsettling. Especially in his worm form, everything about how Godzilla moves and looks feels not only unnatural, but like a willful perversion of nature.
When Godzilla finally evolves into the lumbering, spiky-backed behemoth we all know and love, Anno and Higuchi keep their distance. Godzilla hovers in the background of frames like a fixture in the Tokyo skyline, gaining more and more prominence as the rest of the skyscrapers collapse around him. Combined with the way the terrific cast captures a sense of legitimate awe and horror, and the stripped-down, cinema verite aesthetic of the human-level stuff, the filmmakers have transformed one of the most familiar silhouettes in genre cinema into something to once again fear and flee.
But maybe it’s the humans who make this Godzilla so, well, godly. Now, I know that no one who goes to see a Godzilla movie gives a crap about the human characters. You don’t read the Bible for its prose, and you don’t watch a Godzilla movie for the scenes where dudes in labcoats rattle off nonsense sci-fi babble while looking at test tubes and monitors.
But the human element in Shin Godzilla adds another layer towards the movie’s reclaiming of Godzilla as an item of fear. You see, normally in a monster movie there is some of external impetus screwing things up and making things worse, whether that’s a crazed general, a crazed scientist, a crazed politician, aliens, hostile governments, etc.
Shin Godzilla at first seems to be heading in that same way, satirizing the layers of bureaucracy in government that makes even the most basic of decisions a convoluted process. When America and then the UN jump in and begin making moves to deal with Godzilla themselves and remove Japan from the process, it sure looks like Shin Godzilla is going for a lacerating portrait of current politics.
Instead, the film is eventually revealed to be going for something deeper and maybe darker. You see, in Shin Godzilla, as troubled and back-biting as these human institutions can be, they do eventually get their shit together. They put aside their problems and work together for the common good.
And it’s not enough. Even with collaboration, even with the best minds across the globe putting forward their best work, Godzilla still just rolls through and devastates whatever is in his way. While Shin Godzilla climaxes with triumph (you can’t exactly end the first movie in your franchise re-launch with the world ending) the haunting final shot suggests that the work is never done, that the state of humanity may be to always stay only one step ahead of doomsday, with another apocalypse always waiting around the corner.
Godzilla is that apocalypse. He’s every sin humans have committed against each other and the world, returned back a thousandfold. And if there’s one thing we can learn from this unstoppable series, it’s that no matter how many times you think you’ve won, Godzilla is always coming back.