Shin Godzilla

Shin Godzilla (2016)
Toho Studios
Director: Anno Hideaki, Higuchi Shinji (co-director and special effects)

Reminder: This blog contains plot spoilers, possibly in the main body as well as in the plot summary section. Read on at your own risk!

As with the 1998 Tri-Star movie, when licensing Legendary Pictures to produce a new American Godzilla movie, Toho retained the right to make more of their own domestically. This time, when Toho released a new movie shortly after the American one, it wasn’t a rebuke to an embarrassing failure but was riding in the wake of a success. Toho again experimented with a new approach to the old subject matter, but it felt less like they were trying to show the Americans how to do it, and more like this and Legendary’s Monsterverse could co-exist as parallel takes on Godzilla.

In the event, only Legendary’s version would spawn sequels, but this certainly wasn’t due to any failing on Shin Godzilla’s part.

The “Shin” in the title is meant to be a Japanese word but is spelled out syllabically on promotional images, leaving it ambiguous which kanji character, and thus which actual meaning, might belong to it. It might be “New Godzilla”, “The Real Godzilla” or even “God Godzilla”. Perhaps we might think of it as the sort of “definitive take” that the big US comics publishers like to produce for their superhero characters – an “Ultimate Godzilla”.

The concept had supposedly been knocking around for a while even before Legendary’s success, and this is borne out by the degree to which Shin Godzilla comments on the current affairs of 2011 (but more on that below). The director brought in for this film was Anno Hideaki, one of the founding members of the Daicon/Gainax creative team alongside Higuchi Shinji, who directed the special effects sequences for Shin Godzilla and had done the same for GMK (2001) and the Heisei era Gamera trilogy. Anime had formed the backbone of Anno’s career up to this point, with work for Studio Ghibli and Gainax as well as on his magnum opus, the animated science fiction serial Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995-96) and its many follow-ons and do-overs. Toho had been trying to get Anno on board for a few years, struggling against the writer-director’s own depression and poor self-confidence. Having secured him, they marketed this film like their credit ratings depended on it.

A private yacht, the Glory-Maru, is found adrift off the coast of Tokyo. The coastguard board it and find it abandoned, but are startled by a disturbance in the water nearby. At the same time, the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line toll tunnel fractures and is flooded with red seawater. A meeting of government officials can come up with no explanation for the upheaval in the bay – the likeliest cause is presumed to be tectonic activity, even though that would be out of the ordinary for that area. The officials urgently reconvene to oversee the developing situation.

The tunnel and surrounding area are evacuated. Although there were a few collisions in the tunnel, there are no fatalities, but the evacuees are alarmed by the continuing disturbance of the bay and loud thumping sounds echoing through the tunnel. In the Prime Minister’s room, cabinet ministers propose mundane explanations, refute each other’s suggestions and recriminate with each other for not sharing their views beforehand. Yaguchi Rando, a deputy chief cabinet secretary, is alone in pointing out the recordings posted online by evacuees who witnessed the tail of an enormous creature thrashing about in the bay. The assembled ministers pooh-pooh this. The officials urgently reconvene in the main conference room to discuss the matter further.

In a rambling meeting, members of the Cabinet discuss the economic impact of the disruption. Yaguchi tries again to raise the subject of the creature sighted in the bay and is hushed, but the meeting is brought to a halt when footage of the mysterious tail is broadcast on national television. Not wanting the ensuing discussion to be minuted, the officials urgently reconvene back in the PM’s room.

(You’ve probably got the general picture by now...)

The Cabinet ministers debate whether to attempt to destroy the creature, capture it for scientific study or simply drive it away. Yaguchi stresses the need to gather more information about the creature, although his colleagues still aren’t paying him much attention. The Cabinet consults with some elderly senior academics, who are unable or (for the sake of their reputation) unwilling to offer any suggestions. Meanwhile, the creature heads towards the Tama River, leaving a steaming red trail across the water in its wake. It causes flooding and destruction as it barges its way upstream, with a familiar row of dorsal plates now sticking up out of the water. Yaguchi encourages his executive assistant Shimura to call in a university friend who now works at the Ministry of the Environment, Ogashira Hiromi. Based on the available video footage, Ogashira asserts that the creature is a serpentine, aquatic lizard; it has gills but legs as well, suggesting it could leave the water. The PM wants to know how the government should react if the creature does so, but the Cabinet hasn’t yet decided which Ministry ought to be responsible for the situation.

The senior Ministers, who disregard Ogashira because of her low rank, advise the PM that the creature probably poses no lasting threat and urge him to give a press conference to calm the public. No sooner does he announce that there’s no chance of the creature coming ashore than the creature comes ashore. (At this stage, it’s walking bipedally but in a low hunched position that makes it look quadrupedal; it has stumpy fins instead of forelimbs. It has an alligator-like mouth and bulging, fishy eyes. Bloody matter sloshes out of its gills as it walks along.) After several more meetings, the belated order is given to evacuate the Shinegawa district of Tokyo. The roads are soon clogged with traffic. The PM declares a state of emergency and authorises the JSDF to mobilise against the creature only after officials have thoroughly considered the legality of such an unprecedented action.

The JSDF’s joint chiefs of staff agree to launch attack helicopters against the creature, but to minimise the actual use of firepower in case of collateral damage – civilian casualties would ruin public confidence in the JSDF. While the helicopters are deployed and members of the Cabinet urgently reconvene retreat to an underground meeting room bunker, the creature spontaneously changes its form, rearing up on its hind legs and sprouting tiny claws from its fore-fins. The helicopters take position in front of the creature, but when one of the pilots spots an old man and a child crossing a railway line below, the PM loses his nerve and aborts the mission in order to avoid casualties. Unimpeded, the creature returns through the city to the bay.

Tokyo soon returns to business as usual, with a little foreign aid. The creature has disappeared and defies all searches for it. The JSDF plan several possible responses to a future reappearance. Yaguchi is appointed the head of a special response team based in the PM’s residence, and he quickly staffs it with outspoken mavericks. The team struggles to gather new information on the creature, because American scientists have snatched up all available biological samples taken from its inland path and ordered the ground sanitised. Wondering about the metabolic energy the creature would need to sustain itself, Ogashira postulates that it might naturally produce some kind of nuclear energy, and this is soon proven by the trail of unfamiliar radioactive isotopes left in its wake. The President of the USA soon contacts the PM and sends a delegate to meet with him in secret. A side meeting is arranged between Yaguchi and the delegate’s assistant, special envoy Kayoco Anne Patterson, the daughter of a senator and the granddaughter of a Japanese woman.

Patterson tells Yaguchi to investigate the disappearance of a biologist called Gorō Maki; if he can turn up more intelligence for her, she can provide more information about the creature. Maki turns out to be the missing owner of the yacht Glory-Maru. Formerly a professor at a Japanese university, he’d been working for an American energy agency. The US had secretly dumped barrels of nuclear waste at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 60 years earlier, and Maki, researching the effects of this, had discovered that it had mutated an ancient marine animal, turning it into the hyper-adaptive creature that attacked Shinegawa. Maki named it after a creature from the folklore of Ōdo Island, his birthplace, known as “God incarnate”, which he rendered in English as “Godzilla”.

Yaguchi’s team hypothesises that Godzilla, having adapted to the high radioactive output of the nuclear waste and now dependent on his own internal nuclear energy, retreated to the bay in order to cool himself down after a protracted period on land. If they can interfere with his internal coolant process the next time he appears on land, they might be able to force him into a kind of shutdown. Godzilla reappears soon enough to the south of Tokyo and heads inland again. (He’s now twice as big and walking upright. He looks a lot more like the traditional Godzilla, but exaggerated – his head, ribcage and hindquarters are in proportion but the rest of him looks shrivelled by comparison. His formerly bulging eyes have shrunk to smaller, more reptilian proportions.) Because Yaguchi’s plan isn’t ready yet, the JSDF is deployed again in full force to protect central Tokyo from what the government now knows is a radioactive threat. Care is taken to ensure that the local population is fully evacuated this time. Unfortunately, conventional weapons are ineffective against this larger, more resilient Godzilla. Glowing bright red at all his joints, Godzilla marches on towards the city centre. Anticipating the PM’s request (!), American stealth bombers are dispatched to attack the beast.

Since the PM’s residence is directly in the path of Godzilla, and therefore of the American bombers as well, the government is hurriedly evacuated. The PM and some of his Cabinet are flown out in helicopters, while Yaguchi and the others take their chances at ground level, eventually taking shelter with several civilians in the subway. At first it looks as though the bombers will succeed, with Godzilla wounded by the first assault, but in response his plates and bright red joints glow purple and he emits a powerful beam of energy from his mouth. Purple beams start to fire from his back and tail too. (Well, that’s new.) The American bombers are wiped out, as are several blocks of central Tokyo and the Cabinet’s escaping helicopters. Having thus exerted himself, Godzilla comes to a halt and falls temporarily dormant.

Millions of evacuees are left homeless, unable to return to the irradiated wards of the city, and the surviving authorities struggle to cope. The Agriculture Minister, one of the few remaining Cabinet members, is appointed acting Prime Minister – a responsibility none of his colleagues wanted, and for which he’s even less suited than his predecessor. The real power behind the throne is Akasaka Hideki, former aide to the PM and now Chief Cabinet Secretary, and also the old friend who gave Yaguchi his career break in politics. Yaguchi’s team regroups and resumes their study of Godzilla, bolstered by fresh biological samples and American scientific assistance. They theorise that Godzilla’s highly adaptable physiology could allow him to multiply asexually and spread rapidly around the world, a thought that leads the US to propose launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike against him while he’s still immobile. The UN Security Council supports the proposal and the acting PM is railroaded into accepting it. The international community pledges to help Japan rebuild afterwards, but only if it permits the strike for everyone else’s sake.

Godzilla begins to warm up again and is projected to lurch back into action in 15 days. America grants the Japanese government two weeks to evacuate three and a half million people from Tokyo and many more from its environs. This gives Yaguchi’s team a window of opportunity to rush their plan into effect before the strike. They identify a blood coagulant that reacts with the biological samples and rush it into mass production. Meanwhile, a chance discovery with the late Gorō Maki’s notes helps the team to understand the process by which Godzilla’s body converts waste heat into the energy he needs, a process which they will need to inhibit for the coagulant to freeze him as planned.

With the acting PM’s consent and the assistance of the JSDF, Yaguchi’s team’s plan goes ahead. Through backroom political contacts in France, the team gains another 24 hours from the UN Security Council to produce the chemicals they need, while Patterson puts some US military drones at their disposal. The plan is to exhaust Godzilla, then pump him full of coagulant while he’s down. Bullet trains full of explosives are driven into his feet, waking him up, then six waves of drone attacks draw his radioactive fire until it’s spent. Demolition explosives bring the surrounding skyscrapers down on top of him and industrial vehicles are sent in to administer the coagulant orally. The process is only a third complete when Godzilla regains consciousness, blasts the cranes and gets up again. But this has been anticipated – Godzilla is pummelled with explosives again until he collapses, then two more divisions of cranes send the rest of the coagulant down his throat. Godzilla rises yet again and gathers his strength for another attack, but freezes solid, his core temperature reduced to nearly 200 degrees below zero.

A more leisurely study of the devastated area reveals that Godzilla’s novel radioactive isotopes have a half-life of only 20 days – the whole of Tokyo should be decontaminated within just a couple of years. Akasaka congratulates Yaguchi and offers him a Cabinet position, with the acting PM’s provisional government due to resign en masse. The nuclear strike was averted with less than an hour to spare, and Japan has agreed to the American strike force remaining on alert – humanity must be ready to live with the constant threat of Godzilla. Patterson also congratulates Yaguchi, telling him that she hopes to work with him again when they’re the leaders of their respective countries. A final close-up of Godzilla’s tail shows that, at the moment it was frozen, the hyper-adaptive creature was about to release a swarm of humanoid offspring.

No doubt about it, Shin Godzilla is a good-looking film. It’s directed dynamically and scripted wittily, so that even though it runs for more than two hours and is a lot heavier on the dialogue and meeting room scenes than you might expect, it doesn’t drag. It’s the first Japanese Godzilla film to use motion capture and CGI instead of having a stunt actor in a monster costume, and the digital designers took full advantage of that to sculpt a Godzilla that a) changes form over the course of the film and b) looks weirder than a man in a costume would have allowed. It’s not my favourite Godzilla design, but it’s bold and it’s new and that counts for something. The one fault I’d pick with Shin Godzilla is that the dramatic music (variations on the same cue) that plays over most of the scenes of people making important decisions constantly drowns out the dialogue. The sound balance on this movie is terrible – thank goodness for subtitles.

The focus of the film is not so much on Godzilla as on how the government reacts to him, with Yaguchi's special taskforce contrasted with the more conservative Cabinet. The taskforce are young, open to fresh ideas and technical innovation, freely discussing the crisis across departmental boundaries in what Yaguchi characterises as a flat team structure. (Although it’s not without its faults. Yaguchi's team are competent, focused and hard-working but they also have no work/life balance, sleep overnight at their desks and seem to eat nothing but instant pot ramen, even before the immolation of Tokyo puts them on an emergency footing. They're a model of the negative stereotype of Japanese workplaces.) The Cabinet are dogmatic, slow to act, reluctant to accept responsibility and quick to pass the buck or point the finger at each other's agencies. Shin Godzilla is as sharply satirical as any episode of The Thick of It (2005-12) – for anyone with personal experience of working in the public sector, the scenes of government meetings are likely to be painful and amusing in equal measure. (Particularly delightful is the moment when the Prime Minister is asked to make a decision and cries in horror, “Right this instant?!”) For anyone else, the numerous shots of men in suits dramatically marching down corridors in the first quarter hour might offer a kind of Monty Python absurdity, but I suspect many viewers might find them a bit dull.

The object of Shin Godzilla's satire, as is pretty well known, is the Japanese government's handling of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant following the Tōhoku earthquake. The magnitude 9.1 earthquake on 11 March 2011, accompanied by powerful foreshocks and aftershocks, caused tsunami waves that in turn caused flooding, loss of electrical power and material damage to the power plant infrastructure, notably to the plant's seawater coolant pumps. Later investigation found that safeguards and emergency management processes at the plant had been undermined by the same mess of corruption, cost-cutting and poor regulatory oversight that had been found at the Tōkai Nuclear Power Plant in 1999. With the risk of radiation leakage unclear, the people of Fukushima Prefecture looked to the national government to formally order an evacuation and to mobilise the JSDF to assist with the humanitarian response to the natural disaster. However, a lack of communication between the national and local authorities, poor collaboration between departments and the loss of information in unminuted meetings meant that the advice, when it came, was belated and contradicted decisions that had already been taken by local leaders. The Tokyo Electric Power Company, acting on government instructions, didn't formally acknowledge that a reactor meltdown had occurred until two months after the event. The public was understandably dissatisfied.

Yaguchi's team is clearly an idealised fantasy government, a cohesive team that has all the answers, while the dithering, squabbling Cabinet offer a more direct comment on the real-world government led by Kan Naoto. (Having said which, Kan himself, one of a string of Prime Ministers whose terms were cut short, reportedly worked harder and more decisively during the crisis than his on-screen counterpart does. He stuck out the immediate aftermath and survived a vote of no confidence before eventually resigning at the start of September 2011 after 15 months in office. He showed at least the blend of drive and accountability that Yaguchi exhibits here.) Godzilla, meanwhile, embodies the crisis itself - first the tsunami surging inland and causing damage, then the nuclear reactor overheating while the local population struggles to evacuate. The evolving situation (and the literally evolving kaiju) frustrates the efforts of the JSDF to respond to it. The problem, once stabilised, continues to loom over Japan and requires ongoing management – at time of writing, the treatment and gradual discharge of irradiated coolant water into the Pacific at what the International Atomic Energy Agency considers a safe level is expected to continue into the 2050s.

Of course, in Shin Godzilla the threat of Godzilla isn’t a purely natural disaster. Anno deftly updates the monster’s origin – it’s still tied to America’s postwar nuclear tests in the Pacific, but this new Godzilla has more plausibly (well, relatively speaking) mutated over the decades since rather than appearing immediately after. In this way we can have our nuclear commentary cake and eat it – Godzilla can represent the Fukushima Daiichi disaster and the unintended consequences of America’s nuclear weapons programme. This also provides a springboard for a consideration of Japan’s political relationship with America more than 60 years after the latter nominally ended its occupation of the former.

The deferential, telephone-only dialogue between the Japanese Prime Minister (and later, the acting PM) and the US President is sharply contrasted with the flirtatious partnership of Yaguchi and Patterson. Moreover, the film puts this pair forward as the model for a younger, more bullish generation of future world leaders, with Yaguchi seeing himself as Japan’s PM in perhaps ten years and Patterson harbouring ambitions to become America’s President by the age of 40. (She’ll be lucky – the minimum age requirement is low enough, but if the American electorate couldn’t bring itself to vote for a white woman as President, I don’t rate an Asian American woman’s chances. Then again, I expect it would depend on whether she’s a Democrat or a Republican.)

But Yaguchi’s determination to put the interests of Japanese civilians first is also contrasted with the globalist Realpolitik of his friend Akasaka, who accepts the call for an American nuclear strike on Tokyo in order to keep the international community on-side. This is one of those cases where I think it’s fair to suggest the film has a bit of a nationalist streak.

Shin Godzilla was a resounding success, critically well received and only outperformed at that year’s domestic box office by the anime Your Name (2016). Anno proposed a sequel, but this wasn't acted on and it seems unlikely now. Anno and Higuchi did, however, collaborate on the related Shin Ultraman (2022) and Anno scripted and directed Shin Kamen Rider (2023), cinematic remakes of beloved long-running tokusatsu TV series. The tongue-in-cheek Shin Ultraman, notably, nods and winks to Shin Godzilla in acknowledgement of the debt the original series owed to Tsuburaya Eiji's work on the Shōwa era Godzilla films. For a while there was talk of a "Shin" crossover franchise encompassing these three films and, implausibly, a 2021 film instalment in Anno's Evangelion series. This seems to have been a merchandise and marketing thing and not a serious attempt to create a shared cinematic universe, which really would have been hard to achieve given the rights negotiations for all the different production companies concerned. Still, once you've seen Godzilla shaking hands with Ultraman knock-off Jet Jaguar (in Godzilla vs Megalon (1973)), it's hard to resist the idea of Godzilla teaming up with the real thing.