Here's what you need to know; a seemingly normal day for Japan very quickly gets out of hand when a massive creature appears in Tokyo bay before coming ashore and wreaking havoc, as the situation escalates, the Japanese Government scrambles to come up with a solution to the growing problem. But as the monster continues to grow and the UN and United States get involved, it becomes a race against time to put an end to one of the greatest calamities Japan has ever faced.
Three years ago, Shin Godzilla, Toho's response to the Gareth Edwards directed 2014 film, dominated the box office and blew the minds of critics and film goers of its homeland, being hailed as not only far superior to that film, but one of the best Godzilla films ever made. At the tail end of that same year, I watched and reviewed Shin Godzilla, which had no theatrical release and wasn't on home video yet, so I may or may not have pirated it. The film has since been released on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK, meaning I no longer have to feel dirty about watching it. That rather depends though on if I still feel the way I felt about it three years ago, which, if my last review is anything to go by, isn't a guarantee, so let's revisit what was, at the time, the second most divisive Godzilla film ever, Shin Godzilla.
Shin Godzilla gets right to the point; with Godzilla appearing literally in the first few seconds of the film, except he isn't Godzilla yet, but we'll get to that. What we're getting to now though is how that isn't the film's point, that is in fact something else entirely. Like the original Godzilla, Shin Godzilla is a film is a message, but you may recall that I gave Godzilla vs. Hedorah shit for also having a message, on it delivered too aggressively in my opinion, so does Shin Godzilla work or not? Well, before we get anywhere, let's address a very interesting thing that this film does; it's opening title is a blatant homage to the original, which is kind of awesome, it's also the first of many homages, which sounds great. I say sounds great though because not all of it works; the film's soundtrack heavily uses music from old Godzilla films, which is undeniably cool, but there's only so far you can call it homage before it becomes mimicry, and there are a few times that it feels really forced, like reusing Godzilla's roar from both 1954 and 1984. And while we're on the subject of things that are kind of annoying; my Blu-ray of Shin Godzilla includes both the Japanese cut and a dubbed English cut, and at first, I watched the Japanese cut, but I very quickly decided that I couldn't be arsed with it and just switched to the English dub instead. This might need some explaining, so here we go; as a general rule, it's better to watch a foreign language film in its original language, but Shin Godzilla, at least for me, proves to be an exception for one very simple reason, subtitles.
In any foreign language film, subtitles are part of the deal, unless you're lazy, then you go for a dub. But in this film, the subtitles don't just have to translate what people are saying, they also have to translate white text that appears on the screen to introduce a new character or location, meaning that you have the Japanese white text, the translation of that, and the subtitles of whatever they're saying all on the screen at once. And this happens with literally every character in the film, of which there are literally dozens, and it happens with every location they go to, even down to what floor they're on or room they're in. Can you see how this could get a bit frustrating; the film's overload of information is so insane that it's hard to follow what on earth is going on as your eyes dart from the white text to the subtitles to the white text and back to the subtitles, and not even five minutes in, I'd had enough and went for the dub, thinking it would be more tolerable, and luckily, it was. Once you decide to watch the dub to spare yourself the headache, you might still continue to be confused as despite being a Godzilla film, Shin Godzilla isn't really about Godzilla. Shin Godzilla is less about a giant monster terrorising Japan and more about the political response to it, one that's completely useless and ineffectual due to bureaucracy and red tape. Shin Godzilla is a film where you really have to know what to expect, because if you go in hoping to see awesome scenes of chaos and destruction and a badass monster, you will be bored out of your gourd. There's an awful lot of people sitting in rooms and talking, and occasionally they will stand up, walk to another room and sit down and talk again, which really happens, I'm not making that up. Shin Godzilla's greatest strength is satire, which I'm sure would make Chris Stuckmann happy, the tool, but if you watch a Godzilla film and expect to see Godzilla being awesome, which is entirely reasonable, this becomes one of the film's most damning weaknesses.
When I first watched Shin Godzilla three years ago, I found a lot of it to be boring, and having watched for a third time for this special, while I am coming to appreciate the film's satire, I can't deny that I still find large chunks of it to be boring. A sizable portion of this fault is down to the film's characterisation, or lack thereof. As I said before, Shin Godzilla has literally dozens of characters, and expectedly, most of them completely lack any development, they're just talking heads, but you do still have a few central characters. In the forefront is Yaguchi, an aspiring politician who hates the way his government is run, and as the film progresses and the number of talking heads is gradually whittled down, his nationalism becomes a very endearing attribute, as it's his faith in his country that ultimately saves it in the end. Outside of him you have Patterson, who's a bit less endearing; being an envoy to the US with ambitions of one day being the President, and she is a very politically minded person, to a mildly annoying degree. Outside of those two though, it's genuinely difficult to distinguish anyone else out of the bunch, all the film's politicians, army guys and plucky scientists just kind of blend together into the film's political satire, which, as I said before, is either a strength or a weakness, depending on your expectations. On my third viewing of the film however, I did find myself getting rather swept up in the film's politics; it is enjoyable to watch Yaguchi and his band of plucky scientists try to navigate around Japan's incredibly messy political system, and the conflicts faced by the Japanese Prime Minister make for some amusing and intriguing developments.
That still doesn't change the fact that this film just isn't as exciting as the 2014 film, it's much more comparable to the 1954 film, albeit with a different focus, and while the original is more effective, Shin Godzilla is starting to grow on me as a political thriller. But something the 1954 film did very well was its titular monster, and does Shin Godzilla do the same, well, not really. Get ready for an unpopular opinion, but save for one scene, this film's interpretation of Godzilla doesn't do it for me. This Godzilla has radically different origins to the original film's Godzilla, now being an aberration created from the dumping of radioactive material in the ocean rather than a sea monster woken up by Atomic testing. This Godzilla is a bit more direct in how it's very clearly our fault that it exists, still being a product of our abuse of nature, and like the original, this Godzilla's practically indestructible, as demonstrated in a pretty cool scene where the Army tires and fails to stop it from reaching Tokyo. And when Godzilla is in his fourth form, he does look like Godzilla, nearly. Minus the comically long tail and pathetically dinky arms, he's still recognisable as Godzilla, only now he's covered in open wounds that glow an unnatural red. I've heard many people say this Godzilla is scary, and in some ways, he is, for starters, his appearance is nightmarish, at least in his fourth form, and on paper, a monster that can incinerate an entire city in seconds and can infinitely grow and evolve, becoming ever more powerful and harder to kill is kind of scary, as this monster one day becoming too powerful to stop and destroying the entire world isn't a possibility but an inevitability.
It's a monster that will eventually end the world; as long as it may take, it will sooner or later, meaning Shin Godzilla is, on paper, one of the most existentially frightening Godzillas ever put to screen, but like Godzilla in the Anime trilogy, on paper and in practice are very different things, so does Shin Godzilla do better than the Anime trilogy at least? Not like it means anything, but yes, Shin Godzilla's Godzilla is better than the Anime trilogy's Godzilla, but this Godzilla does suffer from many of the faults of that trilogy. Both films take Godzilla in wildly different directions, both from each other and from Godzilla's history, and while Shin Godzilla isn't a tree that barely moves, it does just kind of walk around, not reacting to its environment in any way, like in the Anime trilogy, when Shin Godzilla is attacked, it either ignores it for responds with its atomic breath, that it can now also fire from its tail and spines. This Godzilla is undeniably very powerful, but that isn't a substitute for a personality or even awareness of its own surroundings. Like the Anime Godzilla, Shin Godzilla is very boring in his behaviour, from his first scene in the film, all he does is walk, the characters even say as much, save for two scenes, all the destruction he causes is simply from things being in his way. For the villain of the film, there is no sense of malice in this Godzilla's actions, in fact, there's no sense of intent of any kind, he's a robot. This changes in what is easily the best scene in the film; the scene where he incinerates Tokyo. In all his years, Godzilla has never caused destruction on this scale; he's levelled cities before, but it's never taken him a matter minutes to do it, yet this Godzilla turns downtown Tokyo into a burning hellscape in seconds and cuts buildings clean in half with a laser focused atomic beam, leading to some haunting and beautiful imagery.
This is all after he evolves into his fourth form, because before that, he's a nightmarish sight for different reasons. When Godzilla first makes landfall and we see his second form, it is way funnier than it should be, he looks like a lungfish. Add to that the incredibly derpy face and generally rubbery appearance and he ends up looking like one of those squeaky rubber chickens instead of an imposing, world ending monster. He starts looking a little better when he evolves, now standing on two legs rather than dragging himself on the ground, his spines are more pronounced and his face is a little bit less pathetic. But his fourth form is the best looking, obviously, it's the most imposing and the one that most closely resembles Godzilla, but being Toho's first CG Godzilla, there are new problems that past Toho Godzilla films have never had before. Like the 1998 film, this fully CG Godzilla has none of the personality and weight that came out of the old monster suits, but unlike that Godzilla, which was lean and quick on its feet, Shin Godzilla is a lumbering beast with as much grace as Leslie Jones in a comedy routine, therefore being more comparable to the Anime Godzilla, which was a boring monster in a boring trilogy, where as Shin Godzilla is a boring monster in a film that I'm starting to appreciate a bit more. This is a better interpretation of Godzilla than the 1998 film, but, as unpopular an opinion as I'm sure this is, it's not by much, and for a real kick in the balls, I actually think the 2014 Godzilla is a superior interpretation to this one. The fact remains though that in Shin Godzilla, one of my least favourite things about it is actually Godzilla himself, but at least this film has grown on me as a political thriller in the three years since I first saw it.
Now Do As You Please
Shin Godzilla is a very bizarre Godzilla film, one where your enjoyment of it is entirely dependent on your expectations. If you want a big, dumb monster movie about a monster destroying a city, Shin Godzilla will put you to sleep with its endless political rambling, but if you want a decently intriguing political thriller, Shin Godzilla ain't bad, even if it's being held back by an over-abundance of undeveloped characters, save for Yaguchi and about two others, as well as by an emphasis on them rather than the titular monster. That being said, I enjoy Shin Godzilla more now than I did three years ago, and I can say that it's worth watching, but the best Godzilla film since the original? better than the 2014 film? nah, not really.
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