With a followup coming to their surprisingly solid last Godzilla outing, it’s apropos to wind back a decade to look at the last time Toho resurrected their iconic radioactive reptilian idol—and it’s one that evidently hit the right chords in Japan, shooting to box office success there. Did it deserve that, or did it warrant being crushed beneath giant-size scaly athlete’s foot like so many model tanks of old?
What made it stand out was the political satire in there right off the bat—now that’s not actually new to the series, going all the way back with the original clearly riffing on the Lucky Dragon incident and nuclear proliferation, nor ones from the eighties very upfrontly decrying the Cold War. Still, it’s not usually what people think of from the series, and here we open with something mysterious menacing Tokyo, with the Japanese government’s main priority being trying to decide which office to hold their emergency meeting in.
Did I mention this was but a few years after the Fukushima incident? Now maybe here’s something why this maybe felt cathartic for the Japanese public.
Our hero is Hiroki Hasegawa as a young politician in the cabinet who of course is more willing to cut through the tape as the situation deteriorates—helped eventually by Satomi Ishihara as a Japanese-American envoy, with the film also having much to say about Japan-US relations (though it’s a bit bemusing to have our American character here speak with a thick Japanese accent too). Still, the opening acts are pretty well-paced as we get behind the scenes of what’s basically a national disaster, and all the compromises and poor decisions that come with that.
Director Hideaki Anno was already experienced with giant-sized scale with the Evangelion franchise, and that also comes into play here with our giant monster scenes—partially filmed with seemingly in-universe cameras, but there’s some actual excitement and spectacle as our big lizard engages the military, who are somewhat more competent in tactics than usual even if it doesn’t really help them. Another neat visual aspect is the constant evolution of the titular kaiju—playing into the theme of radioactive mutation from the keloid-covered appearance to constant change, painful as it seemingly is.
And this is all culminates in one scene of destruction that made me literally raise an eyebrow as it goes into overdrive—but the film does kinda splutter out a bit from there, with a climactic act revolving mostly around logistics, international deals, and grumbling about US-Japan treaties (though there’d be more to work with there a decade later…). There’s still something going on, but you’d hope for a bit more oomph as opposed to peaking just before the third act.
Still, it’s easy to see why it was a success in its homeland—sometimes, you just need to say what a lot of people are feeling. With Japan infamous for glacial legislature, you can almost see why something as all-annihilating as an atomic cancer reptile might almost feel like an antidote to that. And, well, as we’ve seen since, if nothing else that’s sometimes what you need to ram in a message too (even if in the past that’s also been to the effect of ‘get Roland Emmerich better scripts…)
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