Shin Godzilla (Godzilla Resurgence) (Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, 2016)
A very enjoyable take on Godzilla, much more successful (if just as heavy handed in some respects!) than the 2014 US version. Mostly because it presents its story of the monster attacking Tokyo as the ultimate bureaucratic nightmare, showing events almost entirely through the eyes of politicians and military generals and their cabals of advisors sitting in rooms and urgently back and forthing. Or doing walk and talks. Or looking straight into camera and demanding action from the Prime Minister, in shots from his point of view! Even amusingly in one moment a number of characters wrestling the camera away from one another to have their moment of looking into it (or rather the computer monitor that the camera is standing in for)! If you've ever wondered what the Aaron Sorkin-world version of a Godzilla film would be, this is it!
I can see how people looking for monster action might feel a bit frustrated by all of the scenes of people sitting in rooms and talking! But I thought it worked quite well especially in a context of a post earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima meltdown world (where such allusions, and the fallout from them, feel a bit more appropriately used here than the more offhand allusions in the 2014 film). I remember being particularly struck during the real life events by the one news report that noted just how big of an event the earthquake was by describing that the chandelier in the Prime Minister's office started gently swaying (whilst coastal regions were engulfed by a tidal wave, and a nuclear power plant melted down). Well, in this film the chandeliers do a bit more than sway!
The film is sort of doing a homage to the original 1954 film, in the way that its quite a slow burn for the longest time and less about the monster than the societal response to its rampage. But there's a lot of other things in there too: Hideaki Anno seems to have brought a lot of Neon Genesis Evangelion touches, from the way Godzilla mutates through different forms that force a reassessment of tactics (including a potential flying one, that's only barely averted), to how lots of the scenes of people arguing in rooms or intently watching monitors have been framed and blocked to take on a certain anime staging sensibility. Plus there's the instantly recognisable "Decisive Battle" track from Evangelion in the film, underscoring the ragtag 'renegade' (whilst still being part of the government, naturally!) band of investigators trying to come up with the right plan to stop Godzilla in the face of Prime Ministerial weakness and the US President wanting to take the easy way out by dropping another atomic bomb on the country!
Which will incidentally cover up any US involvement in toxic nuclear waste dumping (that's the different ecological slant here compared to the 1954 film, less atom bomb testing and more toxic radioactive waste dumping on coral reefs. But its still implied to be the US's fault!)
and let the US government keep all of the samples from the creature for study! There's a pretty blatant suspicion of US motives, and annoyance at continued US involvement in Japanese affairs 70 years on from World War II (it did make me think, and this includes everything going on with the continued state of Cold War in the Korean peninsula recently too, that there is a sense that the US in this region hasn't really moved on from the initial presence in Asia to a kind of relationship more fitting to the 21st century. "Post-war never ends" is one of the more memorable lines in the film). Though its still a friendly kind of suspicion, the kind that comes from not knowing whether the 'bigger brother' that has taken you under their wing has your best interests at heart, or won't hesitate to sacrifice you if they need to! And there's a fun subplot involving the young Japanese-American lady doing behind the scenes deals involving bilateral information sharing arrangements, who apparently harbours ambitions to become US President by age 40! Move over Hillary, there's a new contender in town!
(But thankfully, in a hilarious development, the French are around to do an apparently characteristic last minute behind the scenes stalling tactic in the UN to prevent the atomic bomb being dropped according to schedule!)
Another seeming Neon Genesis Evangelion influence is that there's also a barrage of subtitles from the very beginning describing
every single character's name and rank, as well as introducing every location, no matter how briefly seen, in great detail. It is really impossible to keep up with all of those titles flashing by for a second or two before the next one turns up (and it seems more to create a sense in the viewer of being overwhelmed by authority and rank, and so on - all of these people being thrown for a loop by the appearance of a monster wrecking the capital city!), but I found that motif became extremely moving in the big 'firestorm' attack sequence where brief shots of different areas of the city that have never been seen before appear with a location title and then immediately get engulfed in radioactive flame! Maybe it was unintentional, but I thought that made the whole usage of dry descriptive titles pay off in a great way.
There's a bit of Independence Day in the film too, especially in that big attack scene in the middle of the film, which quite impressively seems to pay homage to the first alien attack scene in the Roland Emmerich film (including people fleeing underground and a number of members of the government getting obliterated in their helicopter!), and on that note I kind of love that the big Independence Day-style jingoistic call to arms speech is instead here a heartfelt begging of the staff to work as hard as they possibly can at their conference room meetings about the dire situation!
And this might just be me, but there felt like a bit of an association with the
final shot of Urotsukidoji in those wide shots of Godzilla destroying the centre of Tokyo! It might just be because this Godzilla film plays more like a horror film than any recent entry has, especially in the moment where the power to the city is knocked out and the night scene is lit mostly by the red glow coming from inside Godzilla itself. Godzilla is properly nightmarish looking in this film, especially in its first water based form with its goofy fixed rictus grin and habit of spraying blood from its gills all over the city (perhaps another homage to the Evangelion 'Angels'), and then with its expandable jaw that acts like a laser cannon later on. Something about the way the monster is being filmed also adds to the disturbing aspect too, maybe that it feels too fantastically monstrous in the context of such an otherwise mundane world all around it. It feels truly alien and out of place in this film, in a good way!
No tower block (or commuter train) is safe from being pressed into sacrificial service for the greater good here (can vehicles and buildings be said to have carried out a kamikaze attack?). If its not the monster knocking a building over, its the humans! I like that the main bureaucrat character we follow, who sort of seems destined to become the new Prime Minister (after a snap election once everything is back to normal of course!), ends up in the final scene watching the plan play out from the roof of a building, ordering the different phases of the operation like a general! I had the image of the double watching over the big battle scene in Kagemusha come strongly to mind during this sequence, and I suppose it makes sense as they're both about presence of the leader (in this case the political representative) as a figurehead being an important motivator for their troops, rather than them actually doing any physical actions to help out!
I thought this was a lot of fun. Its presented
very dry on the surface, but there are enough moments involving endless, interchangeable meetings to suggest the film has a wry sense of humour about all of the bureaucracy! And it was great to see Shinya Tsukamoto turn up as the older, scruffier biologist character who helps with all of the breakthroughs about the monster's behaviour patterns and lifecycle (I kind of want him, the 'computer nerd' lady with the ever present laptop and brusque demeanour, the main charismatic politician character and the Japanese-American lady with her extensive web of contacts to all get together for a CSI: Japan-type series at some point!).
Probably the funniest moment was when they have to do the inevitable "what's the monster called? Gojira but the Americans call him Godzilla" moment, and someone goes to the internet to see if there's anything on there about the origin of this weird "Godzilla" name. And they find one result. A single, solitary web result about Godzilla! Which obviously means that this all takes place in a different universe from ours, where a Google search for Godzilla returns 46,800,000 hits!
