Streaming Thoughts: Shin Godzilla
Jun. 19th, 2019 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmer“Giant monsters” are sort of tangential to what entertainment I do find the time to take in, but when I heard one recent movie would be streaming for a limited time on Funimation’s house-label service, which I’d subscribed to not that long ago, that did get my attention. I’d seen a thing or two positive or at least interesting about it, not the least of that it being a Hideaki Anno production. For what “free movie-watching time” I could carve out of one week, I took a chance on Shin Godzilla.
I once bought a Criterion DVD of the very first Godzilla, although after that I have to admit my familiarity with the franchise amounts to the two movies that wound up in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 canon (and that canon includes the majority of the other giant monster movies I’ve seen, making for a rather adulterated experience). Having seen suggestions Anno’s movie was getting back to “Godzilla as a metaphor for atomic menace” in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis was one of the things that had interested me, although I couldn’t escape occasional feelings of strangeness about the movie being set in a world where it seemed giant monsters hadn’t been invoked in fiction that way before. Still, the score often quoting a piece from the soundtrack of Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the name “Godzilla” being spoken before it’s sorted out the Japanese version of that is “Gojira,” just might have some bearing on that on a level under that of “surface story.”
The first appearance of the under-evolved monster did look kind of cheesy to me (even if I can make up a comment or two about “commenting on how things used to look in these movies”), but at full scale things reached a vast exhibition of deadly spectacle to stand out against the political commentary and more humble teamwork (although the second isn’t always presented as “more useful than the first”). In the end, the movie both invoked a memorable early sequence in Evangelion and recapitulated the original Godzilla taking on the monster without needing a friendlier monster. Even if that’s a bit of a contrast to certain interpretations of Evangelion, I am willing to accept halfway positive stories these days.
I once bought a Criterion DVD of the very first Godzilla, although after that I have to admit my familiarity with the franchise amounts to the two movies that wound up in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 canon (and that canon includes the majority of the other giant monster movies I’ve seen, making for a rather adulterated experience). Having seen suggestions Anno’s movie was getting back to “Godzilla as a metaphor for atomic menace” in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis was one of the things that had interested me, although I couldn’t escape occasional feelings of strangeness about the movie being set in a world where it seemed giant monsters hadn’t been invoked in fiction that way before. Still, the score often quoting a piece from the soundtrack of Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the name “Godzilla” being spoken before it’s sorted out the Japanese version of that is “Gojira,” just might have some bearing on that on a level under that of “surface story.”
The first appearance of the under-evolved monster did look kind of cheesy to me (even if I can make up a comment or two about “commenting on how things used to look in these movies”), but at full scale things reached a vast exhibition of deadly spectacle to stand out against the political commentary and more humble teamwork (although the second isn’t always presented as “more useful than the first”). In the end, the movie both invoked a memorable early sequence in Evangelion and recapitulated the original Godzilla taking on the monster without needing a friendlier monster. Even if that’s a bit of a contrast to certain interpretations of Evangelion, I am willing to accept halfway positive stories these days.