Review: Shin Godzilla

Japan is besieged by disaster believed by the PM to be the result of an underwater volcano, and the Government heads gather to debate an appropriate and hopefully swift response. And that’s when the bombshell is dropped: This isn’t any of the usual natural disasters, but the destruction caused by a radioactive giant lizard, something that nerdy Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroki Hasegawa was laughed at for initially suggesting. Apparently the Americans have known about the possibility of the creature’s existence for quite some time, and a special envoy is sent from America to help out. She’s Ann Patterson (Satomi Ishihara) Japanese-American daughter of a U.S. Senator. Anyhoo, the creature (dubbed ‘Godzilla’ by the Americans) keeps mutating and growing in size, breathing fire and shooting lasers from its eyes. And yet the politicians keep dithering. Japan is fucked, y’all.

Aside from the 1954 original “Gojira” and the classic all-star monster mash “Destroy All Monsters!” I probably wouldn’t give a wholeheartedly, non-ironic good grading to very many of the Godzilla series of kaiju films. Make no mistake though, aside from the tedious “King Kong vs. Godzilla”, Roland Emmerich’s nondescript “Godzilla”, and the cheapo “Godzilla 1985”, there’s not a film among them that isn’t worth watching at least once. I have a lot of affection for “Godzilla” films, especially the Toho flicks from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Like the recent Western “Godzilla” however, this 2016 effort from writer-director Hideaki Anno is just shy of being a good movie for me and for somewhat similar reasons, actually. We’ll get to that in a minute, but first let’s start at the beginning. Co-directed by Shinji Higuchi, this is a very different “Godzilla” (or “Gojira” if you’re pretentious like me) film than any other Toho have made since the 1954 original. In fact, this is pretty much the only one since that originator to have absolutely no connection to any other “Godzilla” film, not even bringing up the events of the first film as part of its lore. Our writer-director is starting from scratch, folks and it’s a ballsy approach. A minute in and we see that Toho Studios have discovered handheld cinematography as well. More startlingly, the film is mostly told in what could be described as docudrama fashion, albeit with an occasional sense of humour, equally as startling. At times it might remind you of the South Korean monster movie semi-spoof “The Host”. We get some really terrific destruction early on, and the filmmaker wisely adopts the “Jaws” strategy of slowly teasing the reveal of the monster. All the ministerial waffling was taking up significant time, but I can’t deny that some of it is hilarious. People keep interrupting ministerial procedures to supply information that contradicts what has just been said. Priceless. So I was actually really digging this. Then we get our first good glimpse at the central monster and…

It’s pathetic. I have a lot of fondness for the cheesy Toho monster suits of yore, but for a film from  2016 this just wasn’t acceptable to me. It looked like a Papier-mâché Chinese dragon float for a parade. Even Minya from “Son of Godzilla” looked more fearsome than this and Minya looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy. This thing has buttons for eyes for fuck’s sake. I was completely shattered and disheartened, though in fairness ‘Zilla has a great roar in this. 47 minutes in and thankfully the real deal shows up in his more recognisable final form (albeit with a different tail and slowly mutating and enlarging), though by this point I had slowly started to write the film off a bit. The recent Westernised “Godzilla” was similarly disappointing in that it gave us a couple of secondary monsters first whom I mistakenly assumed were meant to be Godzilla so that by the time the real deal showed up, I was already in kind of a pissy mood. It was unnecessary confusion/complication.

Helping to put me in a better mood here was the unmistakable, inimitable strains of Akira Ifukube's unforgettable “Gojira” theme which sends chills down the spine even today. The entire music score by Shiro Sagisu is excellent, actually. Meanwhile one thing this film has over the 2014 Westernised film is the attractive cinematography by Kosuke Yamada, including some really nice sweeping aerial shots. Occasional shaky-cam or not, at least it’s not murky and incoherent. So when the real monster shows up, he looks awesome so long as you understand that the FX quality here is typical of post-70s “Godzilla” films, not great but certainly very decent for what it is. I mean, great FX would be kinda beside the point really, though I should point out that the film does use modern FX. Godzilla here is a CG/motion capture job, just not a Hollywood-grade one. So there’s no rubber suit there. The scenes of the monster breathing fire and some kind of purple emission are really incredible. I also have to admit that corny or not, there’s some real gravity here to the horrendous potential choice of dropping a thermonuclear device on the big radioactive monster. Then again, the monster is already radioactive so the situation is FUBAR to begin with I suppose. I really liked the attention given to outlining the problems with dealing with such an unheard of disaster in modern Japan, it’s the kind of thing no previous “Godzilla” film even tried to tackle in any kind of mature way. I must say though, as much as I kind of enjoyed the hopefully intentionally funny bureaucratic time-wasting, I do feel there are far too many names and faces to keep track of, especially when there’s not a whole lot of depth afforded to them. I also think if you’re going to feature a Japanese character who allegedly grew up in and lives in America (and is special envoy to the US President), it’s probably a good idea to cast an actress who isn’t clearly speaking English phonetically, and not terribly well at that. Poor Satomi Ishihara is gorgeous, but an ‘Ann Patterson’ she most certainly is not. Worse, her character drifts in and out of the film confusingly. Character depth isn’t the film’s strong suit.

Slow and overlong, but with an amusing black comedy meets docudrama approach unlike anything you’ve seen from Toho. Cut this film down to around 95 minutes by mostly excising the pre-final form monster stuff, and you’d actually have a terrific film that blends old with new. As is, it’s just shy of a good score, unfortunately. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth a look, it just means it could’ve been better than it is. Nice try and definitely worth a look, but frustrating. I get the feeling it won’t be too popular in America politically speaking, either.

Rating: C+