Shin Godzilla!

Shin Godzilla is a really good movie. Whatever your feelings about these reboots of the concept over the decades, I have to hope that all lovers of the great and powerful Godzilla can see them necessary. There is a camp quality to Godzilla which many love that is not reflected in this movie, but the scary monster of the earliest films is present and accounted for. I can understand why folks might be put off at how this story is told, but frankly I was fascinated to watch the bureaucracy of Japanese government attempt to deal with the unfolding crisis. It's a strange focus for a flick like this, but not an illogical one at all. Godzilla is always about something else, and this time it's about how modern society has lost the ability to nimbly respond to crisis events because of a lumbering bureaucracy. This movie is a response to the natural and man-made disaster which was the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

More after these SPOILER Warnings!

The story begins quickly when an abandoned boat is discovered, but before we can begin to concern ourselves with that an underwater tunnel bridge begins to collapse and the disaster is on. The focus shifts to the governmental response and we see how the highly complex governmental structure struggles to deal with the developing crisis as events move more swiftly than the procession of meetings can deal with. One young maverick sees that the truth of things needs to be confronted but it takes the arrival of a strange monster rolling up a river bed pushing everything in front of it. This "tsunami" of a threat quickly transforms and we get a strange monster who resembles Godzilla but not quite. The military respond but concern for innocent citizens freezes a potent response. The Godzilla-like beast escapes and the threat seems to have passed. Then suddenly Godzilla returns, fully-formed and the real scope of the menace is revealed. The military is incapable of defeating this powerful monster and it becomes evident that the world community, led by the United States (which appears at some level responsible for the monster) is going to drop a nuke on Tokyo. But our maverick politician has assembled a team of  young like-minded folks and they race to bring a safer solution which will freeze Godzilla not result in a third nuclear strike on Japan. Their scheme to defeat Godzilla is elaborate and demands both imagination and luck, but it works, at least for the moment and we are left with an enormous frozen monster in the heart of the city on the verge of reproducing in some strange way as the movie ends. The need for a sequel is strongly felt.

This is a brisk movie and I found trying to watch it with sub-titles a struggle as the dialogue comes more quickly than I could read it all. Added to the sub-titled dialogue, there are many captions announcing locations and character designations -- a lot of text to process in a relentless story. That pace is wonderful and really that's the best thing about this movie in many ways. The monster appears almost immediately and the every-changing nature of the threat makes it a real teaser as to what is coming next. I didn't know if I was seeing Godzilla or some other monster, but soon we realize it's all Big G, just variations on a monstrous theme.

End of SPOILERS!

I've been reflecting in recent days about the seeming inability of our culture to deal with what seem like fundamentally simple problems. The recent disaster in Puerto Rico has shown a light on how ineffectively society deals with the immediate problems of those who have been thrown onto hard times. Perhaps more perplexing is the ongoing water problems in Flint, Michigan. This is a problem first identified nearly three years ago and still the problem has not been dealt with in any fundamental way. The ongoing problem of the homeless who live on the outskirts and hidden innards of modern cities befuddles me. These are problems in society which can be solved, but for whatever reason have not been. There's money and people, but somehow resources are lost or delayed or misappropriated and the problem continues. Bureaucracy is often blamed for issues which are really the moral failings of people occupying those positions. Failures in institutions to deal with problems increasingly breeds a disdain for the very nature of government.

If Godzilla rolled up on American shores, I really doubt these days that the response would be very much different. Disasters demand leadership and focused commitment and unfortunately we get grandstanding, political dithering and a press which cannot stay focused long enough to change things fundamentally.

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