Growing up, I watched a fair number of Godzilla movies. I wouldn't say I was ever a Kaiju Superfan, but I had a healthy appreciation for big monsters smashing each other, as I assume everyone does. When I was no longer a child, I still appreciated the greatness of the original Godzilla film, but never really "kept up" with the many, many other movies in the franchise.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the American ones tended to be really bad, and they loved to focus on boring human characters, and rarely the giant monsters. This is probably objectively a reasonable choice, because the monsters to some degree can only represent an external force beyond human control and comprehension, but it is also just not really what I wanted. The latest American reboot in particular just spent frustrating little time showing Godzilla. I felt like I was actively being deprived of big lizard action by CGI budgets and writing choices.

Shin Godzilla similarly has lengthy periods free of Godzilla himself, but for some reason it simply didn't bother me as much. I think that part of it is that the focus of the movie was largely on the broader strokes of government response to emergency and the challenges and victories associated with human society in trying to deal with unexpected disasters, rather than really trying to make me care about some random father or daughter or whatever. It just feels more "important" than a random individual in a context like this. There are still individual characters, of course, but they are more archetypes representative of roles than they are specific people; the Prime Minister could have been any Prime Minister, or the young scientist who isn't deeply invested in and calcified by rank could represent any younger outside-the-box type thinker, in the way they serve the purposes of the film.

The movie is also very much Hideaki Anno in "feel." It's hard to explain why, exactly, but you can practically feel the Evangelion vibes emanating from the screen. Even the way Godzilla moved just had a certain anime feel too it. The many forms of Shin Godzilla are basically the Angels of Evangelion, representing different metaphorical threats to humanity transformed into literal direct destructive powers, forcing an urgency to come together and breaking the shackles of the old guard of bureaucracy and conservative thought. Too bad they didn't have a huge mech at their disposal.

In the end I am not sure the movie does enough for me; many of the questions it raises don't seem to have meaningful answers in the movie, and I am not sure there was enough conflict or consequence beyond the myriad self-inflicted delays of the human refusal to address impending problems. I imagine that to a certain degree some of the themes are a direct reflection of some of the specific and local problems that Japanese people would have seen directly with things like the Fukushima meltdown, but I don't really think I have sufficient context or personal experience to judge that aspect of the film as a critique. I'd probably rate it higher if I did.

Score: 5/10

IMDb: Shin Godzilla

PS: I wish we could have seen this movie with the original plans for a potential animatronic Godzilla instead of the fully CGI version they ended up with.

PPS: The idea of an "evolutionary" Godzilla is pretty good. It doesn't actually make much sense but it's a conceit I am willing to simply accept as the basic premise of how it works. And it does provide a nice explanation for why such a huge terrifying creature would have simply never been found before; it may have gone through many self-evolutions prior to this, much too small and non-dangerous for humans to notice in the vastness of the ocean.