(Originally published in am730 "730 Perspective" on August 30, 2016)
Audiences who have always been uninterested in monster movies may wish to join us this time. The author's impression of Godzilla is the Japanese "special film" of "Superman fighting monsters", which inevitably has a "glue taste". This is the first time I have seen a Godzilla movie, and I am very pleasantly surprised. Toho has succeeded this time. Why "True. Can Godzilla get rid of the usual "monster movie" taste? Because writer and director Hideaki Anno focuses on the human side, and spends a lot of space describing the bureaucracy of the Japanese government, the hegemony of great power politics, and the expectations of future leaders.
There is no robot in Anno this time, but the government under his camera is like a huge machine, facing the sudden appearance of Godzilla, the government of success and failure. The sudden appearance of natural disasters exposed the rigidity and inefficiency of the bureaucracy. In the first half of the movie, it is between the tension of saving the nation and the absurdity of the system. Anno's directing skills can be seen in the fact that he has put many characters and a lot of dialogue into the story, but it is not disordered or boring. In the second half of the story, officials who used to be considered "weird" replaced the old ones and fought against the trend, thus expressing the director's expectations for Japan's political leaders.
The scientific explanations such as Godzilla's weaknesses are a bit sloppy. Sci-fi fans may not be satisfied. Godzilla is more like a literary symbol than a scientific problem, which is supported by the arrangement that "the scientist who knows Godzilla best never shows up." On the one hand, the enigmatic Godzilla can symbolize the treacherous international politics. In the play, the United Nations plans to dispatch a nuclear bomb and ignore the historical trauma of the Japanese. On the other hand, Godzilla has always symbolized anti-nuclear, pointing to the internal problems of human beings. The twisted corpses of human beings appear in the tails of the mythical beasts, which means that natural disasters are often mixed with man-made disasters.
However, Japan's attitude between nuclear energy and nuclear bombs is contradictory. The mutation of giant beasts is the sequelae of nuclear energy, but science is a double-edged sword. In the end, dealing with Godzilla still relies on science, but it cannot be done once and for all, and hidden worries will remain forever.
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