Shin Godzilla

"The city is dense and brittle," someone says in Hideako Anno's Shin Godzilla (2016).  Then, an "unknown sea creature" rises from the deep and we get to see just how "dense and brittle" Tokyo is.  Godzilla or Gojiro, depending upon your language and pronunciation is Shin, a god -- "an organism far surpassing man."  ("Shin" is the word for divinity that we detect in "Shinto".)  Like Tokyo, Shin Godzilla is fantastically dense, a complicated set of provocations on the idea of the Kaiju or giant beast monster.  The film purports to be an adult iteration of the creature-destroying-Tokyo movie and, mostly, succeeds -- Shin Godzilla is nothing if not thought-provoking.

The set up is familiar:  a pleasure vessel, apparently a yacht, is found empty and drifting in Tokyo bay.  On the vessel, there are some peculiar charts, seemingly mapping clouds of data, an origami flower, and a strange inscription: "Do as you like."   About four shots after our hand-held camera tour of the yacht, a giant column of water erupts from the bay, blood red foam surrounds the jetting fountain, and, then, an underground traffic tunnel beneath the estuary ruptures pouring about 50 tons of gore onto four-lanes of speeding vehicles.  There follows the first of several long sequences comprised of jump-cuts between administrative meetings and conferences.  People venture various opinions, speakers labeled by surtitles as to their names and rank in the government or its various ministries.  Most of the movie consists of imagery of these conclaves in which officials politely offer differing opinions as to what should be done.  Meanwhile, a sort of larval sea monster, about 500 feet long has come up the river and is now pushing a cone of trains and boats and semi-trucks through the center of the water-front.  No one knows what to do and, worse, different government agencies quarrel over jurisdiction while environmentalists protest about proposals to "exterminate" the huge "unknown sea creature."  Several new agencies are formed and  immediately commence promulgating red-tape restrictions.  The government is paralyzed by its bureaucrats as well as by dependence on the United States, the one great power that everyone in the film seems to despise even more than the sea monster.  Fortunately, the larval Godzilla retreats into Tokyo harbor.  Politicians vie with one another for power and everyone has a political or economic agenda at cross-purposes with other agendas.  The United States sends an ambitious Senator's daughter, Miss Patterson, and she immediately clashes with the rebellious Yaguchi, a realistic young man who is appalled by the bureaucratic chaos hindering any rational response to the threat from the creature.  An agency of nerds is formed, a "flat organization" in which all are purportedly equal, although this group of scientists is led, more or less, by Yaguchi.  Godzilla rises out of the sea once more, this time recognizable as an immense dragon monster with a forest of skyscraper-sized, rubber bristles on his spine and a little lizard head that looks like it's made out of a thousand iron-meteorites all fused together.  Beneath his carapace of spines and scales, the monster throbs with magma-red blood and periodically disgorges tons of the stuff from his gills.  The creature's scales are like tectonic plates gliding on a surface of lava.  This time Godzilla advances into the heart of Tokyo, kills thousands including the ineffectual prime minister and his entire cabinet.  The Secretary of Agriculture, an old codger who complains about limp Soba noodles in his lunch, now is the chief executive officer.  Of course, he takes counsel with the United States government and American officials urge him to authorize a thermonuclear strike on Tokyo, something that is a bit distasteful to the Japanese not only because of the 3.5 million casualties likely to occur, but also in light of memories of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  The nerd conclave labors overtime to figure out an alternative means of destroying the beast.  Lightning fast montage shows a sort of Japanese "Operation Warp Speed" in which scientists and factories labor to produce agents to stop the monster.  By this time, Godzilla is "self-evolving" -- this means mutating -- and gobs of his scales seem capable of regenerating the monster through "self-procreation."  The key to defeating the creature is the weird mandala-shaped map of data points found on the yacht in the first minute of the film.  It turns out that the origami is a clue.  If you fold the data graph, it forms some sort of schematic of the creature's anatomy, which is entirely atomic -- the monster was spawned by eating radioactive waste created by the Americans supposedly and that's why the missing scientist on the yacht turns out to have been a Japanese-American employee of the U.S. Department of Energy.  The gnomic statement:  "Do as you like!" is construed to be a message to the hapless Japanese Self-Defense Force (the SDF) which has been hobbled in its efforts against the monster by limitations on its autonomy.  Japan should "do as (it) likes" in combating the monster and not look to Big Brother America for its defense.  About an hour before the U.S.  is scheduled to commence it'st airstrike, hypocritically saying that it would do the same if the beast were in New York, the SDF launches a full-scale assault on the monster using bullet-trains full of TNT, five sorties of missile-launching drones, and, then, after the monster has been temporarily knocked out, a deployment of huge cranes that inject some sort of super-frigid coolant into the creature.  Godzilla is immobilized more or less under about a half-dozen skyscrapers that have been blasted down on top of him.  He struggles a bit, rises to his feet, but, then, freezes into an enormous immobile colossus, a sort of statue of himself that rises over the Tokyo skyline.  Yaguchi and his nerds are triumphant.  Miss Patterson says that she intends to be the U.S. president in about ten years and hopes she will be able to work cooperatively with Yaguchi (whom she predicts will be Prime Minister).  Yaguchi says:  "You'll want me to be your obedient Japanese puppet."  They both have a good laugh.  The UN and World Bank have issued trillions to rebuild Tokyo, the economy is on the rebound, the familiar corrupt and inert bureaucratic administration seem about to be restored.  In Paris, the Secretary of Agriculture bows deeply to a French official -- it was the French who restrained the Americans for an hour, delaying the nuclear strike so that the Japanese nerd squad could unleash Operation Warp Speed on the beast.  

The film was made before the Pandemic, but it certainly seems prescient.  The monster mutates like a virus, seems indestructible, and ultimately is stopped by an inoculation of super-cooled vaccine (a bit like the Pfizer-Moderna vaccine).  As the movie progresses, the agency devised to combat the creature begins to proliferate sub-agencies and sub-agencies of the sub-agencies all identified by acronyms.  This element of the film, a satiric indictment of the Japanese bureaucracy, is probably the most prevalent theme in the movie -- it's not funny or played for comedy, but, in fact, a deadly serious attack on Japanese administrative institutions and, apparently, derives from the government's ineffectual response to the tsunami and Fukuyama nuclear disaster.  The movie consists primarily of shots of meeting rooms in which groups of men (there are very few governmetnal officials that are women in Japan) debate the problem.  The cutting is fantastically quick and it is often hard to determine what is going on -- the film is Brechtian in that it is "epic":  the concern is not with individual characters but with structures of power, most particularly the Japanese bureaucracy, but, as the film evolves, the world order in which the super-powers bicker over what should be done with the monster.  (The Americans ultimately get blamed for everything and it's the French who save Tokyo.)  The movie is very cold and analytical --  there's no love interest; Yaguchi and the beautiful Miss Patterson's relationship is based upon mutual ambition.  A plain girl among the nerds speaks in aphorisms about the monster and the detail of the creature's anatomy being deciphered as a sort of "fold" or origami pattern is like something out of Gilles Deleuze.  The  impressive creature effects, particularly in the second part of the movie, involve the critter emitting blasts of radioactivity like laser beams from his back and prickly spine and even his tail.  The luminous beams slash through skyscrapers as if they were sticks of butter and the monster is a spectacular apparition glowing like a volcano with satanic red flame.  The movie rushes forward at the breakneck speed of one of Japan's bullet trains and you can't digest the blast of information.  The picture probably has to be watched at least twice to figure out much of what is going on -- particularly the congeries of conspiracy theories animating the plot.  The movie is an impressive achievement but glacially cold and indifferent to suffering, an icy theorem.