Shin Godzilla

I recently watched Shin Godzilla and have to highly recommend it. This is not a campy movie of big lizard punching things (you want that, watch Godzilla vs Kong). This is a movie about how government bureaucracies fail at (and then ultimately succeed at) dealing with unprecedented natural disasters. Godzilla in this is an intentional stand-in for the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent Fukushima disaster. This is a movie where you follow government bureaucrats from meeting to meeting as they debate environmental impacts, economic implications, logistics of evacuation—sometimes adjourning one meeting to go to another—cut between images of Godzilla’s destruction that are genuinely upsetting. (No gore, but you do see bodies in rubble.)

It has a lot of commentary about Japanese politics, particularly its relationship with the United States, and deals very deeply with the implications of foreign military action on Japanese soil. I confess to having only a glancing knowledge of Japanese politics, but the resonances of government inability to react quickly to crisis are maybe a little too close right now.

One note—the version on Amazon streaming is the dub only. The dub is…serviceable. I don’t know what services have the sub for streaming, but this movie is incredibly dense with overlapping dialogue and almost always has someone’s name and title on the screen, so though the dub I’m sure flattens nuance, the sub might be very hard to follow for a non-Japanese speaker.

Definitely, definitely check this movie out though. It’s incredible.