8 Films With "Subtle" Messages (That Are REALLY Obvious)

Godzilla has taken many forms over the years, sometimes an ominous force of destruction, sometimes a figure of Saturday morning fun, sometimes man's doom, sometimes his ally. But originally, the radioactive colossus was a metaphor for the apocalyptic nuclear devastation wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American nuclear weapons.

Director Ishiro Honda's dark, gloomy classic features scenes of ruin that clearly recall the Japanese cities smashed and flattened by American bombing during the Second World War.

American adaptations of Godzilla tend to downplay the aspect of US responsibility for nuclear aggression - the 1998 Roland Emmerich remake even blames the French for their nuclear testing, preferring to ignore the history of US nuclear weapons altogether. In the original, it couldn't be clearer that Godzilla is a way of dealing with national trauma, or, as one twitter user recently put it, that Godzilla is "cultural scar tissue".

Later Godzilla movies, though they vary wildly in tone, also have political themes. Godzilla Vs. Hedorah, from 1971, for example, is an environmentalist parable as much as it is a Kaiju clash movie. 2016's Shin Godzilla, too, was openly political, dealing with the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Godzilla has always had an element of protest.