Being Film #19 for Hooptober 2021

We’re so busy with the spectacle of shared universes and CG indistinguishable from reality that we forget the lessons of our monsters. Japan hasn’t, and Shin Godzilla is a reminder of the power the most famous kaiju in the world has in holding a mirror to the nightmares of our own making, allowing us to process unspeakable events through the rampaging of a massive radioactive fossil from the past. Where Ishirō Honda found a way to comment on the horrific aftermath of the atomic bombings of Japan in WWII, so now do Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi of Neon Genesis Evangelion fame craft a multi-faceted look at a country in turmoil after a devastating event, with the nuclear behemoth standing in for the very real terrors following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, which happened following an earthquake and tsunami off the coast of eastern Japan.

Continue reading “Hooptober 8.0 – Shin Godzilla (2016)”