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In the Flesh: Shin Godzilla
🕑 Added 2020-05-12 01:38:16 +0000 UTCShin Godzilla’s meeting scenes — and there are a lot of them — are among the funniest, most crushingly honest depictions of bureaucracy in action that I’ve seen. Watching the Japanese government hem and haw about what might or might not be a gigantic radioactive marine reptile plowing its way through an urban center is as blackly hilarious as director Hideaki Ano’s (of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame) fissured, dead-eyed take on the titular king of monsters is disturbing. Government officials play hot potato with facts and responsibilities as the country literally comes down around their ears and the US debates with absolute authority about whether or not to drop a thermonuclear warhead on Tokyo. It’s funny in a kind of nervous, painfully plausible way, like an Armando Ianucci comedy operating one level of fakery deeper.
Visually, Ano’s movie is a feast undercut only occasionally by the limits of its CGI. Smoke and shaky cam obscure the worst of this quite well, and the resultant images convey the terror of the presence of the monstrous divine far better than the recent American reboot series. Godzilla looms on the horizon like something out of Sean T. Collins’ piece on the monumental horror image, a ragged black figure veined with nuclear fire and trailing the phallic tentacular mass of its bizarre tail. Close-ups of its body read more like volcanic landscapes than a living thing, and its ghoulish, expressionless muzzle is genuinely chilling. When it unleashes its energy beam in the film’s third act the violet light and guttering flames are rendered with sensual perfection, transforming the monster’s destruction of Tokyo into an awe-inspiring spectacle.
Every edit in Shin Godzilla is applied with care, the indoor scenes blitzing from phone to phone as conversations branch and grow through multiple government agencies and then collapse back into their points of origin. The film’s final stretch after the monster’s temporary defeat hews a little neat and sunny for my taste, but its closing image of monstrous humanoid figures frozen at the aperture of Godzilla’s tail is so disturbing that it washes away any bad taste left behind by a short burst of stilted dialogue and iffy blocking. In Godzilla humanity confronts the sins of its reckless excesses, invoking the ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the more recent tragedy at Fukushima’s nuclear reactor, and Godzilla recreates them in its image like a vengeful deity, leaving them caught in indefinite suspension between the dual threats of an American nuclear strike and the monster’s reawakening. That’s how you end a goddamn movie.
Comments
Misha Moon
Having worked in Bureaucracy my whole life (first in health care, then in education), this movie absolutely got that part of the government's response right. Also, now knowing the term Monumental Horror Image makes this look back especially delicious. An amazing reflection as always.
Zappa Johns
haven't watched it since the tremendous experience of seeing it in theaters, this essay's made me want to revisit the film soon!
