Shin Godzilla
Returning to theaters, 2016's Shin Godzilla, responsible for kicking of the franchise's reboot into the Reiwa era, is an odd film. A talky film focused more on the politics and bureaucracy of Japan's response to Godzilla than the monster (who literally just stands around for much of the film), it has notably prolonged lulls before returning to the title character. As for Godzilla, the film makes an interesting choice making the creature mostly unrecognizable (almost laughably so) on his initial emergence from the ocean and having him slowly metamorphize over the course of the film into something that finally more closely resembles classic Godzilla.
The effect is to make the humans the stars of the film and Godzilla mostly a looming afterthought (at least until the film's climax). There are a host of characters here, many of whom are largely interchangeable and almost all immeadiately forgettable. Satomi Ishihara is notable as a Japanese-American ambassador from the United States whose striking beauty can't obscure her limited English making it hard to believe she was raised overseas. And, in term of ideas that haven't aged well, it's hard to see her character as a rising Presidential candidate in the United States knowing the country's quite prominent current anti-immigrant racially-fueled bigotry.
Shin Godzilla might be an okay watch on a lazy Saturday afternoon where you have nothing better to do, but the film doesn't command the attention you need to follow the story. I nearly fell asleep in the theater twice. I don't know that the remastered 4K version of the film helps making some of early Godzilla sequences look even more odd and otherwise just providing more clarity to office building sequences. It's also of note that given the government's focus on evacuation first, something discussed at length, by the time we get to Godzilla destruction it's mostly through empty areas of the city which the 4K rendering highlights a bit too well. For a film overflowing with long stretches of dialogue it ultimately doesn't have much new to say.
Watch the trailer- Title: Shin Godzilla
- IMDb: link
