In a sentenceGodzilla flattens a suburb and the cabinet’s first response is to move to a bigger room
Steam erupts from the water off the coast and a road tunnel beneath the bay floods. The cabinet of Prime Minister Seiji Ookouchi (Ren Osugi) gathers and argues over whether the cause is volcanic; Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa) says it is a living creature and is told to sit down. Then something with gills and fixed, staring eyes hauls itself up a river into a crowded district of the city, pushing boats and cars ahead of it. Yaguchi is handed a task force of officials nobody else wants, among them Hiromi Ogashira (Mikako Ichikawa) from the environment ministry and the biologist Kunio Hazama (Shinya Tsukamoto), while the smooth adviser Hideki Akasaka (Yutaka Takenouchi) manages the prime minister and an American envoy, Kayoko Ann Patterson (Satomi Ishihara), arrives with her own government’s demands.
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Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi remake Godzilla as a disaster-response procedural, and the procedure is the point. It is talky, odd and sometimes clumsy, and its creature, when it appears, is the strangest and most frightening the series has produced.
Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi have made a Godzilla film in which the monster is on screen for perhaps a third of its 120 minutes and the rest is meetings. That is not a complaint. Shin Godzilla is about what a modern state does when something impossible comes out of the sea, and its answer, delivered with a straight face and at speed, is that it convenes. We found it funnier and more frightening than we expected, and also tiring, which seems to be intended.
The first act moves fast. Steam rises from the bay, a tunnel floods, and the cabinet debates whether it is looking at a volcanic vent. Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa), a junior man who says the word creature out loud, is told to be quiet. Then the thing comes up a river into the streets on its belly, head lolling, gills leaking, eyes like painted plates, and shoves boats and cars through the streets ahead of it like a wave. We laughed when we first saw it. Ten seconds later we were horrified, and the two feelings never quite separated for the rest of the film.
Anno, who also wrote the script, edits with Atsuki Sato and cuts the meetings as if they were the action. Every official who speaks gets a caption with rank and department; every helicopter gets its designation. Kosuke Yamada shoots the rooms flat and wide under fluorescent light, faces low in the frame, sometimes from a camera set on the table among the water glasses. Eri Sakushima and Yuji Hayashida design a government of folding tables, whiteboards and name placards, and the joke, repeated until it stops being funny and then becomes funny again, is that the placards keep being carried into another room. Prime Minister Ookouchi (Ren Osugi) asks whether he is allowed to authorise a shot and is told a form is missing.
Shirō Sagisu, Anno’s composer since Neon Genesis Evangelion, supplies the choral and percussive cues that make a spreadsheet scene feel like a countdown. Alongside him the film uses Akira Ifukube’s marches from the earlier Godzilla films, and when the tanks roll out to that music we were moved more than we can quite account for. It is old music for old machines, and the film knows both are about to be found wanting.
Nobody here has a home life. Hasegawa’s Yaguchi is a decent man who is good in meetings; Takenouchi’s Akasaka is the adviser who always knows which way the wind is blowing; Ichikawa’s Ogashira says one flat sentence per scene and is right every time; Tsukamoto, the director of Tetsuo, plays the biologist Hazama with an unseemly delight. They are job titles with faces, and the film is content with that, so the two or three moments when a voice cracks land harder than they would in a warmer film. The exception is Ishihara’s Kayoko Ann Patterson, an American envoy who announces her intention to be president, speaks English that wobbles, and is written as a sketch in a film that has decided not to draw people. Most critics have picked on her, and they are right.
There is a sequence at about the hour mark, at night, over the city, that we will not describe. We watched it with a hand over our mouth. Higuchi and Anno stage it slowly, almost quietly, and it is the point at which the film stops being a comedy about paperwork and becomes something that is plainly about a real disaster, still recent when the film was made: press conferences, evacuation maps and men in blue jumpsuits. The film is angry at that memory and also proud of the people who worked through it, and it does not always manage to hold both moods in the same scene.
After that the creature goes quiet for a long stretch and the film becomes a plan: chemists, pumps, cranes, phone calls to foreign capitals. Several critics have complained that the monster vanishes for much of the second half, and the complaint is fair. The ending is a procedure carried out, and it goes more or less as planned, which is not what a monster film usually gives you. We were gripped anyway, mostly by the faces of people doing sums under a deadline.
Watch it with subtitles and be prepared to read; the captions arrive faster than anyone can say them. It runs 120 minutes and carries a 12, which is fair for the violence and slightly generous for the dread.
Most critics come away favourable, though the mixed verdicts are almost as numerous as the positive ones. The praise gathers in two places. The first is the political satire: the scenes of Japanese officials bickering in committee rooms while Tokyo comes apart are widely called shrewd, pointed and funny. The second is the creature itself. Reviewers admire the unsettling redesign, the awe-inspiring scale and the destruction sequences, and several note that the effects grow more convincing as Godzilla mutates.
The reservations gather around the talk. Many find the dialogue-heavy stretches slow the film, and a few say it runs too long. Empire complains that Godzilla disappears for much of the second half, and Time Out finds too little horror in the monster’s return. HeyUGuys, the lone outright dissenter, calls the film cold and monotonous, with thin characters. The spread is wide: from four stars to a shrug, with most reviews settling somewhere between entertained and unconvinced.
The critic finds the reboot unconventional and distinctive. They praise its shift from bureaucratic satire into a chilling nuclear-threat thriller.
Read the full review →Turner finds the film an effective blend of monster movie and political satire. He especially praises its impressive effects and sharply written treatment of political dithering.
Read the full review →Rife finds the film a charming, smashing return to form despite its dialogue-heavy stretches and anticlimactic ending. She praises the creature effects and the spectacular battle sequence, while noting the film’s pointed bureaucratic satire.
Read the full review →Leydon finds the reboot largely satisfying and surprisingly clever. He praises its political satire and increasingly persuasive effects as Godzilla mutates.
Read the full review →The URL identifies this as a review of the matching film. The page returned only an access error, so the critic’s verdict and specific praise or complaint are unavailable.
Read the full review →Bradshaw finds the film watchable entertainment, though its first glimpse of the monster and an American character disappoint. He praises the shrewd, amusing scenes of Japan’s bickering bureaucracy.
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GodzillaIshirō Honda’s original: slow, sombre and still frightening, with Ifukube’s music first heard here.
The Host · not on Fi1m yetBong Joon-ho’s river monster film, where the government is as dangerous as the creature.
Dr. StrangeloveThe end of the world managed by committee, played entirely for laughs.
ThreadsBritish nuclear catastrophe told through council memos and shopping lists; do not watch alone.
ContagionSoderbergh’s pandemic as briefings, spreadsheets and cold rooms; the paperwork is again the point.
