Godzilla, I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday, Mkay…
Back in 2016, I made the noble decision that I was finally going to see a real Japanese Godzilla film on the big screen. Not a dubbed Saturday-afternoon creature feature. Not some half-watched cable rerun with commercials for reverse mortgages and miracle mops. No, this was going to be the authentic article: Shin Godzilla, in a theater, as intended.
So the wife and I drove an hour to the one theater in semi-suburban Florida that was showing it at two in the afternoon, because of course there was only one. The place was nearly empty, which should have been perfect. Instead, some lunatic with what appeared to be a full restaurant entrée decided to sit three seats away from us in the middle of an otherwise deserted auditorium.
There are people who say we should not judge those who go to restaurants or movies alone. I say those people are cowards. How am I supposed to enjoy a pleasant outing when some lonely goblin is nearby unwrapping a feast like he is holding court at Medieval Times? But enough about the true horror story. Let us move on to the giant radioactive one.
The Good
Shin Godzilla is one of the smartest films in the entire franchise (admittedly not the highest of bars), in part because it understands that a Godzilla movie does not actually have to be about Godzilla in the conventional sense. Much like Godzilla Minus One, this is one of those entries where the monster is almost the delivery system for a different kind of movie entirely. In this case, that movie is a savage political satire about bureaucracy, institutional paralysis, and national trauma.
This is very clearly a post-3/11 film. It is about the earthquake, tsunami, Fukushima, and the feeling that the systems supposedly designed to protect people were instead caught flat-footed, overly procedural, timid, and incapable of acting with any kind of urgency. The movie goes after Japanese bureaucracy with both barrels. Endless meetings, constant reshuffling, layers of protocol, officials waiting for permission to request permission to consider the possibility of maybe doing something later. It is all here, and much of it is hilarious in a bitter, bone-dry sort of way.
That tone is one of the film’s great strengths. This is not a joke machine, but it has a wonderfully absurd sensibility. Watching serious people in suits respond to an evolving nuclear reptile with conference-room etiquette and administrative gridlock gives the movie a strange comic energy that really works. At its best, Shin Godzilla feels like a political comedy-tragedy with a monster in it, rather than a monster movie with some political window dressing.
I was also surprised, revisiting the film by how much I liked the English dub. Usually, saying a Godzilla dub is good is a little like saying an airport sandwich exceeded expectations, but this one genuinely does. More importantly, the dub actually helps sell the rhythms of the script.
The human scenes played better for me this time around than they did in the subtitled version, because the absurdity of the bureaucratic language and the dead-serious delivery of increasingly ridiculous circumstances land with a little more comic precision. It is not Airplane!, exactly, but it has that same appreciation for people treating lunacy as routine procedure.
The effects are also terrific. The first appearance of the creature in its early, deeply unfortunate form is one of the best reveals in franchise history because it is both hilarious and unsettling. This is not heroic, majestic Godzilla. This is an abomination. A grotesque municipal emergency.
It looks wrong, moves wrong, and creates exactly the kind of queasy fascination the movie needs. Later destruction scenes are equally impressive, and the film does an excellent job making Godzilla feel less like a monster you fight and more like a catastrophic event that exposes every weakness in the system around it.
The Bad
For all its strengths, Shin Godzilla absolutely loses momentum in the second half.
At two hours, the movie is simply too long for what it is doing, and you can feel it about two-thirds of the way through. This is frustrating because some of the best spectacle is in the back half. There are destruction scenes here that would have made an eight-year-old me deliriously happy. Palm trees. Drone attacks. Bomb trains. Yes, bomb trains, which is the kind of phrase that earns a lot of goodwill all by itself. But while the action ramps up, the drama thins out.
The problem is that the satire begins to repeat itself. Early on, the bureaucratic dysfunction feels sharp, insightful, and darkly funny. Later, the movie keeps making the same point long after the audience has already gotten it. Yes, the government is slow. Yes, committees are ineffective. Yes, official processes can become absurd in the face of disaster. All true, all well observed, but eventually the film starts circling those ideas instead of deepening them.
The filmmaking does not help much here. While the screenshots show fantastic cinematography, but much of Shin Godzilla is filmed with a fisheye lens and features weird angles and awkward close-ups. There are more scenes of people on the phone in Shin Godzilla than Terror at Tenkiller.
The characters do not help much either, because while they are functional and occasionally entertaining, they are pretty thin. In the first half, the energy of the premise covers for that. In the second half, when the satire begins to flatten, the lack of stronger character work becomes more noticeable.
A little romance between the leads would not have been out of place. Some growth for the very turtle-like temporary prime minister would have helped. Even a more tangible non-Godzilla antagonist such as the Americans, French, somebody, might have given the second half a stronger dramatic spine. Instead, the story more or less becomes: they come up with a plan, they carry out the plan, and the plan works. That is competent storytelling, but it is not especially gripping.
There is also my recurring complaint with modern Godzilla power scaling. I think this version of Godzilla gets a bit too overpowered. I do not mind his being impervious to artillery fire. He should be terrifying. He should feel beyond human control. But once the movie adds more and more laser-beam devastation, it edges toward excess. Less is more with this stuff.
Godzilla has always had radioactive breath, but at a certain point he starts to feel like a final boss with too many unlockable abilities. I had a similar complaint with Godzilla Minus One. Sometimes the monster is more effective when he is simply inevitable, not when he is also apparently carrying the entire weapons platform from a discarded anime pitch meeting.
The Ugly
Honestly, the ugliest thing in the movie is that first form of Godzilla, and I mean that as a compliment.
That thing is hideous in exactly the right way. It does not look like a polished kaiju icon. It looks like nature had a nervous breakdown. The bulging eyes, the awkward movement, the sheer wrongness of it all. It is grotesque, absurd, and weirdly funny, which makes it memorable in a way a more conventionally “cool” design would not have been.
If we are speaking more broadly, though, the ugly side of Shin Godzilla is the worldview it presents. This is a movie about institutions failing in slow motion. About governments being unable to react to obvious threats because reacting requires consensus, procedure, hierarchy, and paperwork.
The way disaster reveals not just courage, but inertia. Even when the movie is funny, there is venom underneath it. The joke is not just that the system is clumsy. The joke is that the system is clumsy while people are dying.
That gives Shin Godzilla a mean streak I admire. It is not interested in flattering power. It is interested in showing how absurd power can look when reality refuses to cooperate.
In Conclusion
Shin Godzilla is one of the most interesting and ambitious films the franchise has ever produced. It is funny, pointed, technically impressive, and refreshingly willing to use Godzilla as a vehicle for political satire rather than just urban renewal through nuclear breath. At its best, it is brilliant. The first half in particular is sharp, strange, and consistently entertaining, with an absurdist edge that makes it feel unlike almost any other kaiju film.
But it is not quite a brilliant film. The second half drags, the satire wears out its welcome, the characters never deepen enough to carry the dramatic load, and the movie ends up feeling a little less satisfying than it should. Much like Godzilla himself here, it starts as a horrifyingly fascinating force and eventually settles into a more mechanical pattern.
Still, even with those flaws, this is a terrific Godzilla movie, or perhaps more accurately, a terrific political disaster movie that happens to have Godzilla in it. And sometimes that is the best kind.
Just do yourself a favor if you watch it in a theater: sit far away from the guy eating a full entrée in the middle of an empty auditorium. Some monsters are more disruptive than others.
I learned something new from this post.