Shin Godzilla is the most authentic successor to Honda Ishiro's film simply because it does not take the eponymous creature for granted. In the several previous reboots, from both sides of the Pacific, each new incarnation of Godzilla may be mysterious to the films' characters but the monster is already familiar to the audience. This is because past reboots have treated Godzilla as more of a character and less of a symbol.

By contrast, 'Shingoji' is not a character. Its thoughts and emotions, if it has any, are as totally inscrutable as its motives. And unlike in many past Godzilla films, the human characters do not evaluate the creature on those terms. Why would they? Shingoji most obviously stands in for natural disasters; the 2011 Triple Disaster specifically. Do you ask an earthquake what it wants? Do you wonder if a nuclear meltdown experiences unhappiness? No, you just do everything you can to end the crisis and mitigate the damage. But is that all there is to Shingoji?

The creature is actually an 'empty signifier' for the mounting dangers threatening contemporary Japan. It isn't as simple as equating a suddenly humongous Godzilla to, say, a suddenly rich and influential China or a suddenly vulnerable United States. Shingoji could as easily stand in for the simmering movement to amend the Japanese constitution to allow for a more robust military. The monster is big enough to represent whatever issue. The high level point is, problems escalate in a seemingly abrupt way, just as the monster surprisingly evolves into more terrible forms. And, more importantly, escalation seems so abrupt because the institutional structures set up to manage problems inherently struggle to keep up.

The movie is overwhelmingly invested in government and bureaucracy. Even the scale of the monster itself is established relative to the hugely complicated systems of law and policy leveraged to deal with it and which make the creature and the havoc it wreaks even more difficult to manage - and yet, paradoxically, manageable at all. In this sense, this is not really a film about a monster attacking Tokyo so much as how modern governments process the challenges facing them: how the regime in power is only ever ready to fight the last war, as opposed to the next one. The haunting final scene promises our heroes' hard-won playbook will not suffice in the future.

Despite its heavy thematics, Shin Godzilla breezes through its two first acts on elegant, dry humor and Sagisu Shiro's tremendously engaging soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film has trouble moving past its expository talkiness to climactic action. The denouement relies more on off-screen/montaged political and logistical wrangling than physical confrontation with the monster. Even in the aftermath, we are left with the protagonists still babbling on and on. Without the threat, these characters and their dialogue don't hold up. But perhaps that is another theme: it's the danger that makes the hero.

Although not without serious flaws, Shin Godzilla is probably the very best Godzilla film possible in 2016. It is self-aware without being self-conscious. It has gravity but not at the expense of charm. Most importantly, it demonstrates that the franchise still has artistic and social relevance rather than being just another established property trotted out because no one has new ideas. Shin Godzilla takes risks that pan out more often than not.

Apart from Loki getting killed, oh and Heimdal and Fury - others not so much.