Nearly a decade after its initial release, Shin Godzilla returns to North American theaters. What was once the highest-grossing Godzilla movie, until Godzilla Minus One (2023), is back with a 4K remaster. As a big Godzilla fan, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see this on the big screen, and I am very glad I did.
Shin Godzilla is a strikingly shot and tightly edited movie that both sets up Godzilla as a menace and creates compelling human drama. However, I feel that drama comes from the politics and policies of international governments rather than inter-personal relationships. At times, the movie goes up and down a chain of command to show the pressure of power and the inefficiencies of political hierarchy.
The movie shares a lot of anime aesthetics with carefully framed shots, which are often intentionally uneven, and purposeful edits that grab your attention when needed. For a movie with front-to-back dialogue, some of its funniest moments come from the order of scenes, the way they cut away from one to the next, and the juxtaposition of what’s being said and what’s really happening. The soundtrack, by Shiro Sagisu and Akira Ifukube, is fittingly bombastic, injecting the right energy for any given scene.
Being a subtitled Japanese movie, the dialogue moves at a breakneck speed and only takes brief breaks to make room for Godzilla to grow even more terrifying. (Luckily, a week and a half of reading a visual novel has prepared me for this movie well.) There are some incredible “money shots” in the movie that are well worth the price of admission for a kaiju fan. By the end, a lot of Shin Godzilla feels like a setup for a potential sequel, with the ending teasing a very interesting narrative thread that I am curious to see expanded upon.
+ GOOD +
- A terrifying Godzilla
- Striking visuals
- Great soundtrack
- Sharp writing
- Intentional editing
– BAD –
- Some really rough CGI
- A lot of setup
- Uneven pacing