Shin Godzilla (2016)

PG-13 for maybe the scariest Godzilla we've seen.  One of the commentaries that I've had running through my Godzilla blogs has been that most of these movies treat destruction as part of the scenery.  This one remembers that destruction affects real people.  The sheer horror of how big this thing is makes it a bit scary.  Also, Godzilla bleeds...a lot.  It's not that he gets wrecked.  But being as big as he is, when he bleeds, it's torrents of blood.  Add to the notion that this Godzilla also evolves, leaving gore in its wake, there's some horrifying things going on here.

DIRECTORS: Hadeaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi

It's absolutely moronic to start a blog at 1:22 in the morning.  I have no reason outside the fact that the house is quiet and I just finished the movie, meaning that it's fresh in my brain.  I might be more of an introvert than I thought I was because I cherish total solitude and silence more than I ever realized.  If I go to bed, that means tomorrow is here.  And, yeah, I'm pretty darned sleepy.  If I put my head on a pillow right now, I would be asleep in second.  Still, here I am.  Writing about a Godzilla movie.  That's okay.  I found a pic of the raddest part of the movie, so that kinda / sorta motivates me to get this thing done.

I'm quasi-breaking my own rules.  I've never been great about my self-imposed rules about how and when I watch Godzilla films.  For every other franchise, I will make sure that I consume content in the order that it was released.  I'm really bad about this.  I inherited a bunch of Star Wars novels from a friend and I'm reading them in publishing order.  Not timeline order.  Publishing order.  I want to know if there are threads of storylines that only exist in publication order.  I have all of the OG Godzilla films thanks to my Criterion box set.  The trouble is...I've seen all of the American ones.  I also watched Godzilla Minus One when it was up for an Academy Award.  So when Amazon had a 4K Blu-ray special (3 4K discs for $33.00!  And I had credit!  AND Shin Godzilla was $29.95 base price?), yeah, I bought it and watched it.  I hate having unwatched new movies on my shelf.  So I broke a rule.  But also, did I?  I mean, I was never really attached to this rule.  I had so many caveats to this story that I didn't really care that much.  Also, my wife is out of town and I could only watch 4K movies on the main TV.  So stop judging me, Myself!  

This is one of Bob's favorite movies.  I kind of get why.  Before I go gushing about this movie, I do have to come to an honest takeaway, completely innoculated from Bob's perspective.  Shin Godzilla is such a work of genius while simultaneously being kind of a trainwreck of a film.  Sometimes I say that when I'm not sure about a movie.  That's not what is going on.  I stand by that paradoxical statement.  By far and away, this is one of the greatest Godzilla movies ever.  If Godzilla Minus One didn't exist, Shin Godzilla would far-and-away win for best Godzilla movies.  Even beyond that, it might be one of the best disaster movies I've ever seen.  I acknowledge that this movie absolutely slaps and I hope that I have the words to explain why it works so well.  But when I say that it is a trainwreck of a film, I have to point out that this is barely a movie.  

Let's talk about the bad stuff first in the hopes that I have the focus to get back to the genius stuff.  The format of this movie is something else.  Imagine that you had The Martian without ever going to the Mark Watney stuff.  Appropriately enough, The Martian came out a year before this movie and both of these films share DNA.  It even goes as far as to talk about the tenuous friendship that the U.S. and China hold, which is what Shin Godzilla posits, swappng out China for Japan.  But still, I can't help but make those parallels.  The Maritian gives us charismatic and charming Matt Damon as its central protagonist, who is fighting against the disaster of being stranded on Mars.  From any perspective, that is an unprecedented event and the entire movie uses scores of minor characters, all of whom have a nuanced skill that involves lots of talking heads throwing ideas at each other.  Now, Shin Godzilla also has that element.  This is another reboot of Godzilla.  It's a reboot that doesn't mind using the iconic music, like James Bond or Superman.  But still, it's a reboot, so that means that the people of Japan in 2016 had no knowledge in-universe of a giant kaiju whose sole purpose is to destroy Tokyo. To defeat Godzilla, the movie takes that hyper-realism of The Martian (I'm using that term "hyper-realism" as a shortcut for "Imagine what this would look like with real people and then cast beautiful actors who give pathos to each line.")  and applies it Godzilla.  Talking heads, some political; some scientific, all contribute a few lines in the hopes that they can defeat this Godzilla crisis.  

And guess what?  It feels way more realistic than other Godzilla movies.  There is bureacratic red tape.  There are economic, political, human, and moral decisions to be made.  There are rooms at people hypothesizing over paper and talking in metaphors to explain complex ideas (I still don't really get the oregami thing).  But you know what the movie doesn't have?  A main character.  There's no Mark Watney for this film.  I would love to say that Godzilla himself is the main character, but that's not even close to true.  Even if Godzilla was in this movie for more than a few minutes (which is a very specific choice), Godzilla is Mars, not Mark Watney.  Without a protagonist, this movie is a lot of jargon thrown around.  Sure, it makes the world feel incredibly lived in and I now know what Japan might look like if it actually had a kaiju problem that it had to deal with.  But from a storytelling perspective...it's really weird.  Like, there is no one to bond with in this film.  When characters die, it's a lot of "Oh man, I can't believe that character died. I barely knew him, but he seemed really important." 

The closest thing you get to protagonists are Rando and Kayoko Ann Patterson.  And, boy, casting Satomi Ishihara as this character was a choice.  Now, I can't throw stones here.  One of the things that America is absolutely terrible at is doing other people's languages in American films.  I'm showing my kids Firefly right now and, from what I understand, the cast of Firefly does an abysmal job of pronouncing Chinese words.  Guess we're on the other side now because I knew that Ann Patterson was supposed to be saying things in English, but I really had to stare at her lips to pick out what she was saying.  Now, that doesn't sound too bad, right?  Kayoko Ann Patterson is meant to be second-generation American, born and bred to be a future President of the United States.  It's completely central to her character.  The even more bizarre part is that, even though Satomi Ishihara needed to crush her American accent, the other Japanese actors who interacted with her spoke way better English than she did.  It's her entire character.  The most insane part of that is that there are a lot of genuinely, authentically American actors in this movie.  Is Ishihara a celebrity in this film and only agreed to take it if she got the biggest part, which I may remind you is not that big of a part?  

So why do I say that this movie is genius?  It's got a whole lot going for it.  I'm a guy who gates jargon in films.  Considering that I watch a lot of sci-fi, you'd think that I'd be all about it.  This is a movie that is almost a commentary on X-number of years of Godzilla. (Yeah, I could look it up, but I really want to go to bed before 2:00 am and it's 1:50.) Outside of the original Gojira, the threat of Godzilla was always kind of nerfed in these movies.  Where I'm at in the old school movies, Godzilla is a straight up hero.  The last film I watched involved a kid who was obsessed with all of the kaijus fighting in Japan.  This isn't that.  This is about the genuine horror that your entire homeland probably will be destoryed and there's not much that you can do about it.  From moment one of proto-Godzilla crawling its way on land, it feels like the most unstoppable force imaginable. 

And then the movie takes it even further.  I have that image above.  I loved this scene so much.  Godzilla always had his radioactive breath that set things on fire.  I'm sure that there's a term for it, but again, almost 2:00 am.  That thing was always cool.  It was super-duper rad in Godzilla Minus One.  But this movie scared the crap out of me.  That thing was so devestating in this movie that I thought that the genre was going to shift from kaiju-disaster-film to the opening act of Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  Also, when Godzilla doesn't look goofy (which he absolutely does a ton of times in this movie. When he's digital, he looks pretty rough.  When he's practical, there are times that he looks derpy.) he's really scary.  Like, there are shots of just his face and it's stuff out of nightmare juice.  It's the old Godzilla look put through a meat grinder in the best possible way and it is unsettling.  I was going to watch it with my eleven-year-old son, but I lied to myself and through that he wouldn't like subtitles.  The reality was that I didn't want to plant yet another nightmare in his head after we bought him that Stranger Things calendar.  

Oh, the resolution is anti-climactic as heck.  Sorry.  I forgot to mention that earlier.  The plan just kind of...worked?  I expected a little bit of a turn.  Yeah, it took a couple of tries, but it just worked.  

Still, in terms of quality, this movie slaps pretty hard.  Yeah, it gets a bit boring going from meeting to meeting.  There are times I started referring to this movie as C-Span Godzilla.  But Godzilla destruction itself?  Man, it was haunting.  I would talk about the allegory shifting away from discussions of nuclear war to the fear of nuclear fallout in the wake of an earthquake in Japan, but I didn't get that as much as I wanted to.  It was a lot less condemning than I thought it would be.  Still, it treated the content of the film vulnerably, so maybe that stuff is there and I just didn't get a lot of it.