About

A wily mix of blackly comic satire and spectacular kaiju destruction, Shin Godzilla tears apart Tokyo while offering incisive commentary on the Japanese government's handling of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The film is the most recent live-action entry in the long-running Godzilla franchise and it showcases a return to the original 1954 film's pointed political commentary. Moving away from the various non-nuclear incarnations from across the decades, the titular creature of this film is powered by mutation derived from radioactive waste dumped into the ocean.

First noticed causing havoc in Tokyo By, Godzilla takes to the shore to move amongst the metropolis's skyscrapers and use its ever-growing roster of powers to cause mass destruction. Meanwhile, American military officials threaten to engage a nuclear-based military response while the labyrinthine Japanese emergency bureaucracy struggles to untangle itself in time to deal with the monstrous problem.

The scenes of bureaucratic circularity are drolly biting – situated somewhere between Kafka and Dr. Strangelove. Endless hierarchies of politicians and civil servants (whose increasingly elaborate titles are placed on screen at each first appearance in a long-running joke) engage in inane debates and buck-passes while the city crumbles. Yet despite the time spent on the scenes of administration, the major action sequences are vividly realised and enormous in scale. The creature design is eye-catching and singular, with each new change in form adding new deadly elements into contention. Shin Godzilla is a major new entry in the series perhaps most closely associated with nuclear concerns in cinema.