10 Greatest Monster Movies Of The 21st Century

Created as Godzilla-originator Toho’s answer to Gareth Edwards’s 2014 reboot, Shin Godzilla (titled Godzilla: Resurgence in the West, and unfortunately not about Godzilla’s shins) actually has a lot more in common with Arrival than it does with its American counterpart.

Sure, both films are about Godzilla trampling and energy blasting his way across cityscapes, but while Godzilla revolved around the survival of a whitebread nuclear family, Shin Godzilla is all about the scientific and geopolitical ramifications of a kaiju attack.

There are far too many characters to keep track of in Shin Godzilla, but that’s kind of the point; Japan’s governmental and military bodies wind up becoming characters in of themselves. The movie is filled with fast-moving scenes wherein one room of people issues orders to another room of people, and so on and so forth.

That might not sound particularly interesting, but it makes for some surprisingly intense watching. More than Gojira himself, Shin Godzilla is concerned with if he should be stopped, how he should be stopped, and who Japan should look to collaborate with in order to end his chaotic rampage.

In that regard, it’s a politically savvy monster movie akin to the original Godzilla. But while that film served as a metaphor for the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this feels much more like a commentary on the failures of bureaucracy and humanity’s ability and inability to coexist with on another.

There’s some incredibly ropey English language acting (one character is supposed to be a Japanese-speaking American, who later wants to be US President, but her American accent is about as unbelievable as the very concept of Godzilla), and Godzilla looks like a sock-puppet with googly eyes glued on when he first shows up, but it’s one of the most interesting takes on the monster genre to come out of this century.