Shin Godzilla (2016, Hideaki Anno) (Patreon)

55/100

Somehow completely forgot—though it came back instantly, upon hearing that initial rusty roar and clanking thud—that I'd watched the first half hour of Shin Godzilla back in 2016, as part of my sampling project. Most films get abandoned after 10 minutes, so making it to 30 indicates that I was having a good time, for a while; odds are that I was pretty excited, in fact, since act one in particular amounts to "What if someone made a Godzilla movie in the style of United 93?" We get glimpses of havoc, but Anno keeps the focus squarely on how various government officials, scientists and engineers respond to this unprecedented and potentially extinction-level (for Tokyo, anyway) threat, so that e.g. several minutes are spent on speculation about whether this enormous (but still comparatively small, prior to its final metamorphosis) aquatic creature would be able to support its own weight on dry land. To a nerd like me, that sort of extemporaneous and extremely time-sensitive collective brainstorming is much more compelling than just watching a dude in a rubber suit (or, even worse, an entirely computer-generated monster) smash buildings and barbecue fleeing citizens, fun though the latter can be in limited doses. (Never really got into the classic Godzilla movies as a kid, though they were constantly on TV in the '70s and '80s; at this writing, 1954's original Godzilla is the only one I've properly seen from start to finish, and I didn't enjoy it at all, 37/100.) Shin Godzilla's approach  castigates bureaucrats for their self-serving ineptitude (love the debates about which agency is responsible for something that's never happened before) while at the same time exulting in humanity's (or at least in Japan's) ability to come together, improvise and prevail, The Martian-style. I might have preferred a less dorky solution than more or less force-feeding Godzilla the opposite of antifreeze, but on the whole, it'd be pretty tough to conceptualize a more gemko-friendly kaiju picture than this one. 

Why, then, did I switch it off after just half an hour seven years ago? Didn't keep any notes, but I suspect the belated appearance of Godzilla itself disenchanted me—partly because I'd been digging Shin's fleeting and indirect views of the monster (in much the same way that I wish United 93 had confined itself almost entirely to air-traffic control, rather than also depicting the passengers' revolt), but mostly because Godzilla's initial horizontal fishlike incarnation here looks like a Muppetized parade float. I get that the creature's instinctive actions replicate damage done by the 2011 tsunami, but it's just so damn goofy-looking. Strays dangerously close to New York City being threatened by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, and this ain't a comedy. Since a more traditional Godzilla profile appears in all the marketing, I must have been aware that this wouldn't be its permanent form; still, combined with my disappointment that Shin Godzillawouldn't be Cloverfielding the whole time (he said pseudo-confidently, never having actually seen Cloverfield), that evidently inspired me to move along. 

Now that I've watched the entire film, my disappointment has itself metamorphosed into a different form. Destructive spectacle kicks into arresting overdrive once Godzilla stands upright and starts shooting atomic rays or whatever from its mouth and its funky-stegosaurus plates...and just when that starts to feel repetitive and exhausting, the monster exhausts its energy supply and goes into a prolonged sleep mode, frozen in downtown Tokyo (I assume, not an expert on Japanese geography) like a colossal statue. Between 2016 and 2023, I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, and so was able to recognize how much this Godzilla resembles one of that series' various Angels, which likewise showed up out of nowhere and were sometimes conveniently dormant for periods of time while the humans worked out how to defeat them. But Anno's technobabble wasn't my favorite aspect of NGE, and ultimately he's not as deft as I'd have liked with Shin's torrent of practical verbiage, either. I watched the film on Crunchyroll (which I'm surprised to learn has been around since 2006; anime isn't generally my thing), and the English subtitles very quickly got several seconds ahead of the spoken dialogue, making it quite difficult to tell who was saying what during the numerous heated conferences and meetings that take place; that'd normally drive me nuts (to the point where I just give up and download the film instead), but it made very little difference in this case, because which of the zillion purely functional characters is barking which purely functional demand or question rarely matters. No doubt it helps when I know all of the actors and can remember at a glance who Jeff Daniels and Mackenzie Davis and Chiwetel Ejiofor are playing, plus Crunchyroll's cut of Shin Godzilla omits what were apparently copious English-language descriptors in the U.S. release version. Regardless, the film's ground-level activity wound up feeling extremely busy without ever quite becoming satisfyingly complex, whether in terms of character or satire or strategy. Godzilla freezes, everything else stagnates.