Shin Godzilla Review

 

I don’t talk about it much, but the original Godzilla really affected me as a child. Something about this unintentionally deadly monster really struck a chord with me. He wasn’t trying to destroy everything, he was just trying to live and we couldn’t let him! It was wrong that we made Godzilla, but was it wrong to kill him? Godzilla’s double victimhood hit me; he hadn’t asked to be made, and now he had to die. Something that big just shouldn’t be around. It went beyond questions of good and evil, rendering the frame utterly meaningless. 

Godzilla wasn’t bad or good. He just was.

And therefore we had to kill him. 

To say I’m disappointed by the following movies is an understatement. Godzilla is a quandary, not a hero, a critique of classic liberalism and its obvious stupidity on the face of life and death. Yea, this puts me in the grouch camp. I really couldn’t care less. Hero Godzilla is stupid.

So I was really excited when I realized that Shin Godzilla, the 2016 reboot, was being directed by Ecangelions creator, X. The Rebuilds really turned me around on X, so I figured I’d give this a shot too! Just the poster was enough; X was going for Godzilla’s original tragic roots. And that was enough for me.

What I got was a pleasant surprise: Godzilla isn’t the real monster of the movie. Oh don’t get me wrong, Godzilla is definitely disturbing. There’s something to this redesign I find… demonic isn’t the right word, but unsettling and threatening don’t really do it justice either. There’s something to Shin Godzilla’s face that is so fundamentally alien to me that I can’t help but be creeped out. The moments where he lets loose with his power are masterclasses in how to show power in a movie. I also liked how Godzilla was just as as much a victim of his biology as the humans were, having to stop and deal with his unwieldy biology.

No, the real monster is the U.S and the U.N. It’s a secret to the folks of the U.S. proper, but Japan is really just a colony of ours, in all but name. And the Japanese know it and resent it. This movie treats U.S. as a lumbering monster… that is the Japanese’s monster, protecting them from the U.N. As bad as the U.S. is the U.N. is far worse, both in the movie and in real life. No attempt is made to sugarcoat this reality; Yogucha, the protagonist, calls his country a puppet state.

And yet Japan survives because of his status as a puppet state, with the U.S. helping Japan defy the U.N. As onerous as being a colony is, Japan survived. 

It’s not bad. 

It’s not good. 

It just is.

And that’s a hard pill to swallow.