Toho's Godzilla Films (Shin Godzilla & Minus One)

•Bureaucracy:

- You get a very quick love/hate relationship with it, and you see the humor embedded in exceedingly long descriptions and titles, even if it isn't really humor that makes you laugh, nor is it really absurd, but just exposing the ridiculousness of function. You see the passionate people, the dedicated career politician, and everything in between.
- It simultaneously manages to point out the massive flaws in the system, while also showing how much it is capable of when things go from bad to worse. The same politics and red tape that made everyone so slow to take action and understandably timid in the face of a new and unprecedented situations and lead to the disaster spiraling out of control, is later used to delay the window of a thermonuclear strike against Godzilla in the heart of Tokyo to let the scientific team make their own move.
- You always see big feats of organization in Godzilla films to move power or other things, but seeing the technical side of it makes them feel exponentially more impressive.
- Watching the move of everything from small committees into full-blown global politics from Japan's point of view was astonishingly tense and felt real in the same way the setting of the original 1954 film does. It isn't science fiction at all like so many of the films are, so much as Godzilla erupting in the real world.


•Science:

- I love how far in detail they go into Godzilla's extremophile biology and even talk about how they expect the creature to be crushed under its own weight if it attempted to make landfall. All the really significant details are there, but they're not lingered on, so much as they're just presented as facts with professionals talking to one another — again, it never has the taste of science fiction jargon to it so much as something incredible and never encountered.


•Godzilla's Origin:

- Abstract: "Gojira" is a combination of the words for "gorilla" and "whale" that informed the design of the original. Since the US name, "Godzilla" came along, it started to carry a lot of meaning with the character over his history in films, even causing the '98 kaiju to be named "Zilla" because it took the "God" out of "Godzilla." Similarly, "Shin" is interesting, because it can mean, Resurgence, True, and even God — hence the reason it's specifically left as "Shin" in the film's US title.
- In film: There was no creature in 1954 in this film's canon, as it all starts here. To add to that, the US Department of Energy who was investigating it with the Japanese scientist years before the start of the film termed the creature, "Godzilla" within and the Japanese localize it to "Gojira" upon learning about it, as a way of bringing in all the weight of the English name INTO the Japanese name, which is just flat out brilliant.


•Godzilla's Design:
- Godzilla's first two forms give a lot of design information for why he looks as strange and horrifying as he does. Even the incredibly long tail is something that doesn't bother me in the slightest now, like it did initially. Every horrifying aspect of him serves a purpose.
- The sound when they're testing heavier and heavier weaponry against him is stunningly haunting. I wasn't expecting the metallic armored sound of bullets and shells just glancing off of his skin, but it was incredible.
- His atomic breath is. TERRIFYING. It starts off as straight fire-breathing and basically napalming everything around him. Alone, that would be horrifying, but that is just the start before that focuses into a beam that completely eclipses anything in a Godzilla film seen before. Follow that up with him firing tens of those beams out of his dorsal fins and slicing stealth bombers out of the sky before, shutting down, and seeing what I found to be the best scene in the film — the destruction of that single attack viewed from space (which served to put the idea of dropping a bomb on Tokyo in perspective, even before the statements about Hiroshima and Japan's past). The way that it works, you can see his energy levels dropping and the beam going briefly red and then back briefly into flames before ending completely.


•Subversion:
- For a film where Godzilla gets hit by stealth bombers and 3.6 million people evacuate Tokyo, you don't expect to find a way to avoid the nuke. Additionally, you don't expect the scientific freezing via blood coagulation delivered by concrete cranes to feel as spectacular, especially when following up the utter insanity of the second act's military deployment. Also, VERY much unlike any other of the films, Godzilla isn't killed like in the 1954 film as a warning of worse weaponry, nor does he retreat back as a part of the natural order of things. He's left frozen, and acknowledged that it's something that they have to learn to live with, somehow, even though that "how" isn't clear. Panning up to the final shot makes the timing feel all the more impressive and the potential implications all the more interesting and simultaneously unnerving.

Initially it's got the classic Godzilla, "ponder the meaning of what it's all about" bit that's incredibly well executed. The very last shot un-specifically mentioned in a rushed discussion earlier, but seeing it is meant to give an intentional sense of dread, as well as show just how close they were to being too late to stop it. While the specifics of it are a bit of a mindfuck, it's not unprecedented, but it could also be seen as a hook for a sequel even though one isn't planned, so kinda sorta Gainax-y, but not extremely.

Opening by Shira Sagisu


Classic Godzilla Theme by Akira Ifukube



A tragic piece by Shira Sagisu


A more somber piece by Akira Ifukube


The Neon Genesis Evangelion-style Assembling track by Shira Sagisu


The Military assembling track by Akira Ifukube

A bit more condensed tl;dr from me: http://xsoldier.tumblr.com/post/151742922670/shin-godzilla-is-absolutely-brilliant-in-fact-im

Also, a full review/recap that gets into all sorts of little details and things and generally has the same outlook and opinion of the film that I do. (I listened to it at 1.5 speed, since it's rather long):