What it’s about: A take on Godzilla that presents as a modern disaster procedural, things kick off when the Japanese government discovers a heat anomaly in Tokyo Bay that has damaged a traffic tunnel. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi (Hasegawa) and his belief that it’s being caused by a living creature are laughed off until an amphibious form of Godzilla makes landfall in Shinagawa. It retreats to the water after only a couple hours but the attack causes massive devastation and creates a tense political mess, both within Tokyo and with interested foreign nations, the US in particular. When the mature and aggressive Godzilla reappears, the situation becomes a race between nuclear-armed and reactionary governments and Yaguchi, leading a crack team of scientists searching for alternative ideas.

Reflections: It seems improbable that a movie which is about 75% government meetings would rule this hard, but it does. Part of that is down to the way it moves–characters speak in mostly dry, official language, but there are a lot of them, talking quickly, shooting ideas up and down and throwing out complications at a sweeping clip. This is helped along by mockumentary and found-footage elements: bodycam footage, news broadcasts, etc., which break up the atmosphere and ground the abstract discussions in the outside world. And when Godzilla does appear or make a move, the design is otherworldly and gross and the way it’s shot looks tactile and surreal. It’s a very talky movie, but it grabs the audience quickly and never lets go.

It’s hard to talk about characters or performance–partially because the sheer number of them and the detached style of the film make them hard to keep track of, and partially because I suspect this is a movie that does a lot with the specifics of its language and with small, cultural nuances I wouldn’t pick up on. The portrayal of the American characters is fun, though, and there are personalities that stand out: the American official/senator’s daughter with a Japanese grandmother, a cowboy negotiation style, and presidential ambitions; the socially blunt lady scientist, not afraid to tell her colleague he smells bad; the elderly general seeing a sign of the times in his soggy noodles, and so on.

Godzilla as a figure exists as a cultural reaction to postwar nuclear trauma, and watching this, it feels clear that there is a similar working-through of the Fukushima disaster here–while I’m not familiar with Japanese politics surrounding that incident, an overall sense of criticism of a bureaucratic response with misplaced priorities is palpable in watching Yaguchi and the others wrestle with the system as they respond to something it was never designed to handle. But even without knowing all the specifics, Anno and Higuchi clearly understand the core of what Godzilla represents and deliver possibly the sharpest, most “realistic” Godzilla film ever and arguably the best since the original.