This article appears in the August 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Something emerges from Tokyo Bay. At first, it’s just an appendage, thrashing wildly. If you’re a fan of Japan’s biggest star, you know this tail (and tale) well. But out comes the rest, crawling Tiktaalik-style onto dry land, looking like no creature before it, in the opening minutes of Shin Godzilla. More fishlike than the oversized dinosaurs we’re used to seeing in these movies, it stares with blank, unblinking carp eyes and flops gracelessly forward on its cursed Muppet belly. Even after going bipedal, the beast strikes a singular pose, its jaw nightmarishly unhinged, its skin glowing magma red. This is not your father’s Godzilla.
When the monster first breaches the surface, the puny humans just stare. In a Tokyo conference room, a group of high-ranking officials watch a viral video of that mighty tail rising out of the drink. Paralyzed with fear and confusion, they can only think to do one thing: schedule another meeting. The second room is cozier than the first—all couches and comfy chairs and natural light. It’s a bit like the room where the suits decide which cities to nuke in a different monster movie about a devastating attack on Japan, Christopher Nolan’s scrambled biopic Oppenheimer.
It’s no mystery why Shin Godzilla is being re-released now; the G-man is having a moment.
Originally released in the downright Jurassic past of 2016, Shin Godzilla largely takes place in such nondescript spaces. Not war rooms so much as offices and lounges, where various government functionaries convene to solve the problem of a rapidly mutating new organism stomping its way across urban Japan. Generally speaking, these kinds of scenes are no one’s favorite in a Godzilla movie. They’re the vegetables on the plate, the dry turnip we wolf down in exchange for piping hot gyoza, the dialogue-heavy interludes that move the plot along in between the main event of cities being spectacularly trampled by a guy in a rubber kaiju suit or the CGI equivalent.
Perversely, the filmmakers here regard the debate as the main course. The film is, like its title attraction, an anomaly. It is not your father’s Godzilla movie either.
On August 14, Shin Godzilla trudges back onto U.S. screens, ready to find the American audience it didn’t nine years ago. But in some respects, this is a strange moment for the movie to resurface. Its novelty goes far beyond the ways it redesigns the world’s favorite radioactive reptile. Using the basic template of a suitmation epic, directors Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi deliver something more cutting: a satire of government inefficiency, a monster movie that flirts with concluding that the real monster is bureaucracy. Simply put, that’s an idea that lands a little differently in a post-DOGE world.
IT’S NO MYSTERY WHY SHIN GODZILLA is being re-released now; the G-man is having a moment. Last year, his reunion with a simian frenemy—the chintzy, cartoonish, digital-soup blockbuster Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire—ascended to the summit of the spring box office in all its chest-beating glory, extending the American arm of the monster’s kingdom. Meanwhile, and more winningly, there was Godzilla Minus One, from the original Japanese studio behind the titan, Toho. Between the tickets it sold and the Best Visual Effects Oscar it won (a first Academy Award for the series), Minus One confirmed an appetite for some actual ideas, for a Godzilla movie that’s about more than firing up the adolescent lizard brain. It also proved that it was possible to care about the people in these films, maybe even more than the superbly staged destruction.
Shin Godzilla, which laid the groundwork for the more grounded approach of Godzilla Minus One, foregrounds its human dimension in a very different way. It might be the talkiest entry in a series that’s never exactly been light on gab. But the script isn’t really interested in the lives or personalities of its sprawling cast of characters. They’re more like moving parts in a sometimes sputtering machine. And there’s not much melodrama in its rather procedural portrait of imperfectly addressed emergency.
The premise is more or less the same as what the original Godzilla offered seven decades ago: a primal mistake of evolution that threatens to level Japan. The novelty lies in the municipal tunnel vision Anno and Higuchi adopt, the way they primarily tether us to the vantage point of civil servants scrambling to contain an apocalyptic threat.
Rebooting rather than extending from the IshirÅ Honda 1954 classic, Shin Godzilla presents the title attraction as an “unprecedented event,” a scary first for Planet Earth. Without a road map for this brand-new kind of crisis, the film’s beleaguered government employees can’t always know where the lines of jurisdiction fall. Whose responsibility is it, exactly, to deal with the skyscraper-sized King of All Monsters? Attempts to mobilize the country’s Special Defense Forces are likewise complicated by official, post-WWII articles in Japan specifying that only an “aggressor country” can be met with military action. Godzilla doesn’t fit that bill.
Stretches of the movie are borderline Strangelovian. The bewildered prime minister holds a press conference to reassure the public that the creature can’t survive on land, only to receive the news mid-remarks that it’s rampaging across town as he speaks. Three expert biologists are brought in to offer insight about this new life-form, but none are willing to say much out of fear that they’ll damage their professional credibility. At one point, a general laments that firing on Godzilla might anger environmentalists. And then there’s the token American envoy (Satomi Ishihara), a hard-partying nepo baby who wants to nuke the monster out of existence, mostly in service of her political ambitions back home. (Naturally, it’s U.S. nuclear waste that awakens this adaptive version of Toho’s finest in the first place.)
For all its bone-dry humor, Shin Godzilla doesn’t skimp on the mayhem. Anno and Higuchi, both anime veterans, give the sporadic scenes of death and destruction a spooky grandeur, especially when the big guy lets loose his signature atomic death ray—a terrifying echo of the monster’s roots as nuclear annihilation incarnate. And we get no fewer than four new designs for Godzilla himself, all eccentric enough to distinguish them from decades of more traditionally Tyrannosaurus rex-ian incarnations. As in many of the best entries of this long-running series, the blatant budgetary limitations of the technology become strengths, an idiosyncratic alternative to the most state-of-the-art but unimaginative creature work Hollywood money can buy. This Godzilla’s evolution is a miniature effects coup.
GODZILLA HIMSELF HAS BEEN IN A STATE of evolution for most of his career; visually, yes, but also metaphorically. Over 70 years, he’s represented any number of anxieties: nuclear war, natural disasters, the poisoning of the environment. (The recent American films, meanwhile, turn the King of the Monsters into an ultimate alpha predator, the old god returned to survey and sometimes defend a new world.) Shin Godzilla took more specific inspiration than most, reportedly drawing on the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the TÅhoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011—cataclysmic events it explicitly echoes with images of architectural devastation and overtaxed relief workers. Those parallels give the movie a flush of chilling topicality; not since Honda’s original has Godzilla clawed so directly at the psychic wounds of a shell-shocked Japan.
To that end, Shin Godzilla doesn’t just evoke a dark, recent chapter of Japanese history. It also absorbs the public criticism of the government’s response to it. What we’re watching is a kind of shadow anatomy of botched crisis management: a disaster movie about how poor coordination, worse leadership, and general buck-passing can make a catastrophe worse. And that’s to say nothing of the standard roadblocks of protocol that convolute the government’s path to victory. “Don’t knock red tape,” one passing bureaucrat says. “It’s the foundation of democracy.” But only when the film’s deputy security hero (Hiroki Hasegawa) begins cutting through that tape, partially by assembling his own team of blunt anti-yes men not interested in asking permission, does the tide turn in humanity’s favor. Also crucial to their comeback: every naysaying head of state getting blown to smithereens.
How all this will play for an American viewer in 2025 is another matter. In some respects, Shin Godzilla is eerily attuned to the present day. Nine years ago, it seemed to address a specific string of mismanaged disasters. Today, it can’t help but retroactively mirror the variably botched global response to COVID, a monster much more deadly than any towering beast of land and sea. And the film’s distrust of policies that gum up the works of government, helplessly slowing our response time in moments of urgency, gives it unexpected purchase this summer: Accidentally, Shin Godzilla engages with the “abundance” movement currently gaining traction in Democratic circles—the increasingly popular idea that we need to do away with impediments to progress, to make government faster and simpler in order to get anything done.
But in the wake of DOGE’s devastation, Shin Godzilla suddenly seems a little out of touch with the moment, too. Stateside, it’s difficult to watch right now and not feel a twinge of ambivalence or even nostalgia. Yes, the film’s various politicians and bureaucrats get bogged down in feet-dragging procedure—a purgatory of meetings leading into more meetings leading into meetings about meetings. But they’re still part of a working civic ecosystem, with fully staffed and funded agencies trying their best to respond to an emergent threat. It’s an intact government, in so many words, one untouched by a “drain the swamp” head of state or his world’s-richest-man henchman.
What you don’t see in Shin Godzilla is the film’s dream team of disruptors (who even sleep on the floor of the office, à la a certain barely pubescent geek squad of rise-and-grind Reddit trolls) destroying every institution standing between the Japanese people and agonizing death by fire-breathing leviathan. There is no bomb-thrower nicknamed Big Balls handing the Godzilla research task force its walking papers, no kaiju deniers burning down the building before the monster can do it himself. The movie doesn’t capture, it can’t capture, the harsh reality of how healthy skepticism about government inefficiency has been weaponized to cripple and dismantle the whole system. Shin Godzilla comes from a more innocent time, before we knew where this rebellious drive to cut the red tape would really lead.
Maybe “ambivalent” is also the right word for Shin Godzilla, an inventive, deadpan late sequel that breathed new atomic life into the franchise. After all, what starts as a portrait of woefully unprepared crisis management becomes, by the rousing climax, a celebration of science, technology, and organized communal action. You look at the fully functioning government the movie depicts and think, “It’s flawed but it mostly works.” It can handle whatever the world throws at it, be that gale-force winds, deadly diseases, or a monster the size of a mountain. In Shin Godzilla, bureaucracy stinks, but it’s better than the alternative. That’s a truth that gets bigger and clearer by the day, like some toothy abomination growing fast out of the primordial soup.
This article appears in Aug 2025 Issue.