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Mark Schilling of the Japan Times gave Shin Godzilla 2.5/5 Stars:
Watching “Shin Godzilla,” Toho’s reboot of its signature monster series, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the non-Japanese fans forced to read a blizzard of subtitles for this extremely talky and densely populated film, with a break every 10 minutes or so for Godzilla rampages — the real reason they bought the tickets.
But those rampages — staged by effects veteran Shinji Higuchi and his team, with co-director and sci-fi/fantasy maestro Hideaki Anno supervising — are worth the wait. Working with a fraction of the budget that Hollywood CGI spectacles get, they have created scenes of frighteningly realistic destruction, with a beast that has evolved far from his “man in a suit” origins of Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya’s 1954 original “Godzilla.”
Similar to that film, “Shin Godzilla” unfolds in a contemporary Japan that has never heard of Godzilla. When the beast first makes its presence known in Tokyo Bay in the form of strange rumblings, water sprays and a catastrophic tunnel flooding, the authorities scramble to come up with answers — and decide the cause is a volcanic eruption.
But the sight of an enormous tail, instantly spread everywhere by the media and the internet, scotches that assumption. Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa), a fiery young deputy chief cabinet secretary, realizes they are dealing with a living creature and urges government action, though what that might be, no one knows. The manual for monster attacks has yet to be written.
As in many other Toho kaijū (monster) movies over the years, there are meetings after tense meetings, followed by futile counter-attacks against Godzilla, which mutates from a big-eyed serpent-like creature into a towering, heavy-hipped, seemingly indestructible terror.
The original Godzilla was conceived as a metaphor for nuclear devastation, most notably the then-recent Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Anno’s beast, however, is also clearly inspired by the March 11, 2011, triple disaster, with Godzilla serving as an ambulatory tsunami, earthquake and nuclear reactor, leaving radioactive contamination in his wake.
The government officials, Self-Defense Forces officers and others scrambling to meet this monster menace are held up as heroes similar to the famed “Fukushima 50″ (the workers who risked their lives laboring round-the-clock to stabilize the crippled No. 1 nuclear plant). Despite some initial bumbling, most of these folks, especially Rando and the anti-Godzilla task force he heads, are hardworking, dedicated and formidably bright, rattling off jargon-packed dialogue with nary a pause for breath. And, of course, they are doing it all for the greater good and glory of the Japanese nation.
A sharp contrast is Kayoko Ann Patterson (Satomi Ishihara), a Japanese-American special envoy to the U.S. president. Arrogant, condescending and flaunting her sexuality while the other female characters have all but obliterated theirs, she is the “Ugly American” personified. But, as Ishihara says in a program interview, “the blood of her ancestor’s country stirs within her,” and Kayoko starts to side with her Japanese counterparts, becoming more sympathetic in the process.
Still, the badly miscast Ishihara and her shaky English are not meant for export. Not that the film’s soft nationalism, with its big shout-out to the Self-Defense Forces (who gave its makers their full cooperation) and celebration of core values, self-sacrifice high among them, will hurt it at the local box office.
The film is also packed with Anno’s beloved mecha (mechanical objects), from whirling helicopters to lumbering cranes, filmed in stirring, real-life action. (Unlike the inventive Tsuburaya, Anno and his team have foregone the pleasure of dreaming up futuristic weaponry.) And though he may resemble a big glowing chunk of charcoal, the film’s title star represents destructive forces, natural and man-made, that now extend beyond Honda’s original nuclear holocaust vision. Today Tokyo, tomorrow, the planet.
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
Nah, I'm just as excited to see it. I didn't expect this one to be a Millennium-era romp. I feel like the trailers have been very honest about what to expect.
I can undertsnad the desire to see a film. My enthusiasm for Suicide Squad is not lessened by reviews.
-"Wait a minute.....who is that Frazz is talking to in the gallery? Hmmm something is going on here.....Oh.... it seems there is some dispute over video taping of some sort......Frazz is really upset now..........wait a minute......whats he go there.......is it? Can it be?....Frazz has just unleashed his hidden weiner dog from his mini bag, while quoting shakespeares "Let slip the dogs the war!!" GG
-"Don't mind Frazzled. He's just Dakka's crazy old dude locked in the attic. He's harmless. Mostly."
-TBone the Magnificent 1999-2014, Long Live the King!
Shin Godzilla, as I guess it's known in the US, had a limited 4 day run here. I went to go see it.
Spoiler:
I have complicated feelings about it. To be honest, I'm a simple creature. The movie seems largely about how the Diet is incompetent at handling crises, with endless meetings and gridlock and being so risk-averse that they make things worse. I am not interested in veiled critiques of the inner workings of the Japanese government. I came to see gak get rekt and I saw less of that than I had hoped for.
The creature effects: Godzilla initially shows up as a much smaller creature, like a limbless Dimetrodon. The effects used to create this look would not have taxed the budget of an episode of Power Rangers. In these shots, his head looks like a buzzard head with a giant fake cartoon eye. It looks ridiculous beyond belief.
He shuts down, and morphs into a much larger, familiar looking Godzilla, but with rudimentary forearms and the weird body slashes/internal glow you see in the trailer (this is not even his final form). The Diet sets up a military attack with Huey Cobras, and then chooses not to because of a grandpa with a kid crossing some train tracks - they don't want bad press if the SDF injures a civilian. Seems unlikely but OK.
Finally, Godzilla morphs into a full size Godzilla, similar to the last form but with larger forearms. The SDF finally attacks with Cobras, Longbows, and Type 10 tanks. Godzilla mostly doesn't even notice this, but destroys them anyway.
The ask the US for help until the defense treaty. We produce some B-2s who drop MOABS. These actually injure G, who produces a new to me laser lightshow out of his spines, downing all the bombers. That's about 4 billion US taxpayer dollars down the drain, but it could have been way worse.
Finally the UN decides to drop The Bomb again. Some loose cannon scientists come up with a plan to shut down Godzilla's nuclear reactor by injecting him with no one cares. They do another conventional attack, and then detonate some nearby buildings onto Godzilla, partially incapacitating him. While he's down and struggling, a bunch of tankers inject the no one cares into his mouth. It works, and Godzilla is frozen, a gigantic statue... for now. The UN reminds Japan that the timer on The Bomb is merely paused, not rescinded.
I liked it but you need to be pretty into Godzilla to do so, I think. Honestly one of the things I liked best was some of the novel cinematography I saw, like a fixed POV camera behind the light bar on a emergency vehicle as it sped around town.
lord_blackfang wrote: Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.
Flinty wrote: The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
Do you really need to be "into Godzilla" to like this film? Being really into Godzilla as a character may actually make you struggle with this one. The Godzilla of 1954 was first and foremost a symbol. But the performances of Nakajima and Tezuka, and really even the costume itself, paved the way for the development of a personality. Blue Oyster Cult even references the original basis for Godzilla's characterization, citing his "purposeful grimace." His. Even the notion of speaking of Godzilla with personal pronouns feels inapplicable to the creature we see in Shin Godzilla, which I will call Shingoji for the sake of clarity. Shingoji is categorically NOT a character. It is a symbol - an "empty signifier" ready to be "filled up" with whatever content the [Japanese, emphatically] audience cares to project into it - most obviously the 2011 Triple Disaster.
At the showing I attended, the fans surrounding me giggled at the googly-eyed, eel-necked "Form II" creature. It has garnered a great deal of commentary, mostly mocking. Of course it has! Let's not forget how long people have been laughing at Godzilla generally. Let's not forget that the most common Western reaction to the franchise and its legacy is mockery, especially mockery of the visual effects. When I first saw the blessedly Raymond Burr-less Japanese version of Honda Ishiro's film, it struck me that some of the giggles might be compensatory; that in fact the monster might trigger some kernel of legitimate terror in the audience that needs to be laughed off. The same has been my suspicion of American reaction to the uncanny, consciously surreal monsters terrorizing humanity in Attack on Titan. Probably not a coincidence.
Shingoji grows up over the course of the film but never loses the googly eyes. The eyes just become less noticeable relative to the monster's more familiar profiles in Forms III and IV. Unlike its namesake, it is never assigned a motive or evaluated in humanizing terms. It is simply a living catastrophe. It is a gigantic problem that the bureaucracy must somehow face and - this is the really incredible thing - even solve. I think it is a mistake to read the film as a criticism of bureaucracy - after all, bureaucracy saves the day. The leading man sometimes airs his frustration that the government is not reacting efficiently enough or with sufficient adaptability; and, not without irony, more efficient and adaptable men advise him to cool off and not be smug. Yes, the red tape makes the crisis seem all the more unmanageable in the heat of the moment; but the only way this crisis can be managed at all is through a rationalized, logistical approach.
Somehow, almost magically, the movie easily entertains for about 70-90 minutes despite or perhaps because of its bottomless fascination with labyrinthine policy and legal formalities. But the plot just can't get past its expository talkiness and the third act lacks the action punchline I had been waiting for. I felt like the filmmakers could have cut to someone just explaining how the plucky dark horse bureaucrats stopped Godzilla and it would have been just about as exciting, not to mention much cheaper. Consider the "story" (as in news story) of the Fukushima Disaster: mustn't it simply end with "and then they stopped the meltdowns" or risk getting into the detached world of technical details? And yet "they stopped it" isn't very exciting, either. That's the pit Anno fell into here.
JohnHwangDD wrote: I'm surprised and disappointed that there isn't a major psychological depression aspect to the movie.
It turned out to be extremely "one note," emotionally speaking. Everyone is constantly feeling determination to save the country! But like the ubiquitous hum of fluorescent lighting, there is a constant subtle drone of political ambition. Shin Godzilla is an emotionally complex film, but not because it covers a range of emotions. In that respect, it reminds me of Eva.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/10/24 21:41:05
I saw this on DVD this week and eh. I thought it was Okay but the opening really dragged imo. I think I found the Legendary Pictures Godzilla a more enjoyable film actually, but mostly just because it had more monster fighting. Which isn't to say this film is bad but be ready for long bits of ex[position filled with jargon and technobabble plus a copious amount of political commentary between monster bits.
LordofHats wrote: I saw this on DVD this week and eh. I thought it was Okay but the opening really dragged imo. I think I found the Legendary Pictures Godzilla a more enjoyable film actually, but mostly just because it had more monster fighting. Which isn't to say this film is bad but be ready for long bits of ex[position filled with jargon and technobabble plus a copious amount of political commentary between monster bits.
So standard Godzilla fare then.
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2017/08/09 18:41:49
Subject: Re:Shin Godzilla - UK Screenings 8/10, p. 5
Its Godzilla Resurgence isnt it? I had a chance to see it last year for the limited US release, I enjoyed it, which is a little strange considering the director. I still havent finished Evangelion, its such a slog of characters I hate.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2017/08/09 19:30:22
Yeah the movie was initially marketed in English as "Godzilla: Resurgence" - absolutely terrible! "Shin Godzilla" is a perfect title for this film, especially considering what I am given to understand are the connotations of the word "shin."
Saw Shin Godzilla on a long flight recently. I enjoyed it. I've got a soft spot due to my memories of the old rubber suit saturday afternoon godzilla flicks. Shin had some eyeroll moments, but I found it lots of fun, particularly late-stage godzilla and his capabilities.
"There is rational thought here. It's just swimming through a sea of stupid and is often concealed from view by the waves of irrational conclusions." - Railguns
According to an interview with some Toho people in a past issue of G-Fan, shin has the literal meaning of new but has abstract connotations (god, spirit, faith, truth). I'm not sure to what extent, but this probably has to do with the word (written phonetically in the movie title) being a homonym for several Chinese characters as well as the use of those characters in forming more complicated meanings alongside of other characters.
I liked Shin Godzilla - saw it in theaters. I specially like that I'm a person who often doesn't get subtext in movies, but they alluded to Fukushima so blatantly that even dumbasses like me could understand.
lord_blackfang wrote: Respect to the guy who subscribed just to post a massive ASCII dong in the chat and immediately get banned.
Flinty wrote: The benefit of slate is that its.actually a.rock with rock like properties. The downside is that it's a rock
In an interview published in the most recent G-Fan, Higuchi Shinji explained that he and Anno decided not to base Shin Godzilla explicitly on the Triple Disaster because the audience had been living through it and its consequences, similar to how Honda Ishiro & Co. did not need to talk too much about atomic bombs in the '54 film. In other words, the film leaves space there because of course the people watching can make those connections for themselves. And like in '54, I guess Shin Godzilla has special meaning for Japanese audiences - but the film is not inaccessible to foriegn audiences. The monster in this movie is symbol for whatever massive problems face our society and which can only be faced with collective action.
According to an interview with some Toho people in a past issue of G-Fan, shin has the literal meaning of new but has abstract connotations (god, spirit, faith, truth). I'm not sure to what extent, but this probably has to do with the word (written phonetically in the movie title) being a homonym for several Chinese characters as well as the use of those characters in forming more complicated meanings alongside of other characters.
Shin, written with a different kanji, is the first half of "Shinto" which means Way of the Gods.
According to an interview with some Toho people in a past issue of G-Fan, shin has the literal meaning of new but has abstract connotations (god, spirit, faith, truth). I'm not sure to what extent, but this probably has to do with the word (written phonetically in the movie title) being a homonym for several Chinese characters as well as the use of those characters in forming more complicated meanings alongside of other characters.
Shin, written with a different kanji, is the first half of "Shinto" which means Way of the Gods.
And here I just figured it was Anno adding "Shin" just like he did with Rebuild.
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