Just the Ticket #236: Shin Godzilla
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
I'm at a point, Ticketholders. Some might call it a Singular Point.
The Just the Ticket Countdown to One Thousand Posts is now in the single digits. This is my last live-action Goj-Year-ra project review, and I had so much planned for the last three months of 2026 that it's bearing down on me, and it doesn't feel like I'm going to be able to do it all.
So here's the thought: I'm going to finish September with To Your Eternity as planned, and devote October to finishing my milestone project (which, hint: it's about vampires, and it's isekai fiction) for release on Monday the 26th. All other plans will be postponed until I finish editing the story to my satisfaction, and the release will be preceded by sporadic Heroes Are Made posts featuring characters from the story. I have more conceived than what I am releasing, so the story will continue beyond what you read later next month, and more characters will coincide with those releases.
Also, September has been my best month ever in terms of view traffic, having surpassed twenty-five thousand as I write this.
Now that I can breathe, let's get into Shin Godzilla.
Apparently, Godzilla: Final Wars underperformed, underwhelmed, and underpants'd so hard that Toho took it as a sign to put the franchise on an indefinite hiatus that lasted twelve years (ten, if you count what Legendary Pictures did). The next entry sought to answer the question, "what if Godzilla was also Hedorah, Destoroyah, and a little bit Monster X?" Said answer was 2016's Shin Godzilla (which, fittingly, was also ten years ago).
The movie opens similarly to how Return Of Godzilla did, aboard a mysteriously abandoned ship (but through a literal found-footage lens, as if showing us what Cloverfield could have been like if it was good) belonging to a disgraced marine biologist named Goro Maki (seen only as a photo, using the likeness of the late Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo director, Kihachi Okamoto). If that character name sounds familiar, it recurs throughout the franchise, particularly in Return Of Godzilla (the protag journalist, played by Ken Tanaka) and Son Of Godzilla (the horngry reporter who drops out of the sky and won't stop taking pictures of everything, played by Akira Kubo, of Invasion Of Astro-Monster). But here, there are suggestions that the vanished professor had something to do with Gojira that goes beyond its discovery (like he catalyzed or fused with the creature), so maybe Shin Godzilla has a bit of Terror Of Mechagodzilla and Godzilla vs Biollante in its DNA (so to speak)?
The boat is soon attacked (because that's a staple of Godzilla movies), and the Tokyo Bay Aqua Line (which was planned at UA High School in Godzilla vs Destoroyah, remember?) is flooded with the blood of the creature that sank Maki's boat.
While this is shocking, horrifying imagery to be sure, the first thirty-ish minutes of the movie are less kaiju horror than parody and satire. The human dialogue throughout Shin Godzilla (there are exceptions that I will praise later) consists mainly of red tape, handshaky brown-nosing, disingenuous press conferences, enough quid-pro-quos to make Trump seem selflessly philanthropic, a ludicrous chain of command (the JASDF have to wait and wade through a seven-layer bean dip of confirmations before they are allowed to fire on Godzilla, and then propagate the order back through to not shoot when one of the gunners sees civilians in the blast zone), and Bubsy levels of foot-in-mouth intellectualism that reminded me of the scientist in Godzilla vs Hedorah (the guy who said tadpoles can't evolve to come on land; Shin Godzilla has the same line, almost verbatim).
No sooner do the "experts" conclude that the creature is unable to come ashore, than it grows legs and begins crashing through and bleeding on everything in sight...and it's a big, dumb-looking, undead sock puppet thing that instantly made me think of the Wilkins Coffee mascot.
Yeah; I could not take Shin Godzilla seriously for about a half an hour. Hot take, please don't shoot.
and Jun Kunimura (Final Wars) as the Chief of Staff. Yuki is the standout of the two returnees, as he's given a lot to do dramatically, and plays the beleaguered bureaucrat to the same standard as his previous role.
Speaking of shooting, it's time to talk about the few characters who matter among the clusterfuck legion of bureaucratic NPCs that fill any and every given conference room set that was available, starting with Rando Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa, of the first live-action Attack On Titan movie). Yes, his first name is Rando. It's Hepburn (what was once referred to as "Engrish") for "land," according to Google Translate, but the modern Western slang definition is obvious. His last name, by the same source, is something like "arrow mouth." So, he's just some guy who shoots his mouth off, and despite the frustratingly laughable (by design) writing of almost everyone of "merit" and "authority" in this bloated, tangled, suffocating (again, by design) cast of armchair-warmers, it is his rogue mindset that ends up helping to minimize casualties, facilitate the dissemination of ideas, and generally create flexibility and efficiency in Japan's response to the Gojira threat, ultimately saving the country from becoming a puppeted nuclear wasteland of the United States. Helping him acquire information and coordinate with the US (and later, French) government is Kayoco Anne Patterson (the beautiful Satomi Ishihara, of the Sadako 3D films, who was frustrated to tears by her English-heavy dialogue). Though she uses her attractiveness to her advantage a few times, it's never made the point of the character (because she's credible and ambitious and good at her job), and her interactions with Rando are more like they're new work friends facing a daunting challenge, rather than defaulting to an odd couple romance, and I appreciated that.
We also have two returning actors, with Akira Yuki (my favorite character in Godzilla vs SpaceGodzilla) as the Secretary to the Prime Minister,
Much like with Godzilla 2000, there comes a point where Shin Godzilla starts to feel like a Godzilla movie. And for me, that point was when the giant, amphibious Wilkins Coffee zombie took a little time away from the camera and returned looking like Godzilla. And roaring like Godzilla. And breathing atomic fire like Godzilla. Somebody stop me before I break into a Godzilla-themed parody of the Gaston song from Beauty & The Beast; the Ifukube stock music wouldn't fit it very well.
But my point is that "ShinGoji" (motion-captured by Mansai Nomura, who played Abe no Seimei in the Onmyoji films) is the most terrifying that a Godzilla has ever been, basically having real-time, call-and-response evolution, and being viscerally unpleasant to look at in the best way possible. I still prefer Heisei Godzilla as a design and a performance, though, and Shin Godzilla's origins are derivative and borderline silly to describe out loud.
But I'll try....
Here, Godzilla is a prehistoric organism mutated by American toxic waste (that's where the shots at Godzilla 1998 and Godzilla 2014, and the environmental messaging of Godzilla vs Hedorah, come in) and possibly possessed by the vengeful spirit of Goro Maki (ditto the Biollante and Terror Of Mechagodzilla parallels).
That said, the destruction Godzilla causes is beautifully tragic to watch, the tank choreography as the Defense Force engages with Godzilla is almost dance-like, the race to formulate and mass-produce a cryo-coagulant to stop Godzilla before the US arrives to nuke him is rife with tension and interpersonal drama, the plan actually works (though Godzilla could easily thaw himself out and continue to evolve into millions of humanoid nightmares in the hypothetical sequel), and the message, while blunt, was left to visual and performative delivery. Without social and historical context, I don't know that I'd appreciate what Shin Godzilla was conveying as much as I do, but I did, despite the apparent tonal shift and goofy creature design choices, and I didn't hate the viewing experience. For me, Shin Godzilla is not the Mount Rushmore masterpiece it's generally been received as, but given its native importance, it's certainly deserving of being the second-highest (soon to be third?) earning Godzilla film ever, and of winning seven of the eleven Japan Academy Film Prizes (equivalent to the Oscars) it was nominated for.
B+
Stay Tuned for my final review of September (I have eighteen episodes left of my To Your Eternity binge), and there won't be a Time Drops for October because work on my big milestone project takes precedent.
As always, please continue to support me and what I do by Becoming A Ticketholder (none of you have yet), leaving a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, helping out my ad revenue as you read, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Patreon, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.
8
Ticketmaster,
Out.
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