Godzilla-thon: SHIN GODZILLA (2016)

After the initial success for the 2014 American remake, there was a sudden craze for more Godzilla films. So TOHO announced a couple months after the Japanese release for Godzilla that there was a new Godzilla film in the works. Hideaki Anno, director and creator of the show NEON GENESIS EVANGELION, was brought on board to direct Shin Godzilla. Producer Akihiro Yamauchi stated that the title for the film was chosen for the variety of meanings behind the syllable for "shin", which could mean "real", "true", or "god". Anno's idea was to bring Godzilla back to his original roots and what he was suppose to represent, which was a metaphor of man's misuse of nuclear energy.

The marketing for Shin Godzilla started in December 2015 with the movie's first teaser trailer showing only a clip of the film that was shown in first person view with no sign of Godzilla except for his roar at the end of the trailer. On April 1, 2016, there was an announcement for a crossover movie called Godzilla vs Evangelion. Of course this announcement was a joke, but the cross collaborated marketing and merchandise for the brand was real.

In mid-April, the new look for Godzilla was revealed showing him to be completely CGI and details about Godzilla and the film were also revealed. Themes in the movie included the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant disaster and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

This is the first time Godzilla went solo since Godzilla 1985. All other movies since then had Godzilla fighting another monster.

Review:

Japan faces a crisis as a giant creature causes havoc in Tokyo. Japan's Ministry of Defense must find a way to stop this nightmare before the United States launches a nuclear attack on the creature they call Godzilla.

This movie is sort of a mixed bag because this whole movie does not really have a story to follow and you don't follow a handful of characters the movie follows. The characters are the Japanese and US politicians which were made as parodies of Japan's and America's leadership on how they handled the 2011 incident. The movie is one giant political statement of what happened in 2011 and director Hideaki Anno made it VERY obvious of that. That is all what this movie was about. It was basically retelling the whole 2011 incident, but instead of the earthquakes, floods, and collapsing power plants it was Godzilla. Shin Godzilla was movie of the year for Japan last year, but in America not so much. There are no characters to relate to because this movie considers Japan as a whole as the main character. Most of the movie is showing board meeting after board meeting just to figure out how to deal with Godzilla. Also, the subtitles are EVERYWHERE! The movie pours out so much information that it becomes difficult to follow at times and sometimes you miss parts of what the characters are saying. Not only that, there are labels that tell you who the characters are over their heads and areas of Japan where Godzilla is attacking. About half the screen was covered in text, which I found very annoying. All I want to do is watch the movie! Do I really need to know every single minor character or minor detail?! Even though I'm being critical by the overload of subtitles, the acting is pretty good... at least in the original format. I watched this movie again this time everything was in English so I didn't have to read the subtitles. The English dubbing is god awful! No effort was put into voi