What caught my eye was a genuinely unsettling image of Godzilla in one of the new film’s posters. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what made me so nervous. Maybe it was the familiar awkwardly protruding shape of the monster, the blood-colored markings running down its neck, or the bug-eyed unfocused gaze that pierced outwards in seemingly all directions at once. But I knew right away I wanted to see Shin Godzilla when it got an American localization in theaters.

A bit of background info – Shin Godzilla (also titled Godzilla: Resurgence) is the 31^st Godzilla film made, and this vision of the kaiju monster was produced by Toho, the original producers behind the Godzilla franchise. The film began production in 2014 and smashed the Japanese box office earlier this year, becoming the highest-grossing Godzilla film ever made. Success like that makes a good case for international releases, and so Regal Cinema offered select showings of Shin Godzilla (thankfully with English subtitles) this past weekend.

Without spoiling too much of the plot – Godzilla appears off the coast of Japan and wreaks havoc on Tokyo. The film details the government and military’s efforts to stop the monster while minimizing civilian casualties. And to be fair, this is what most of the movie is: scene after scene of bureaucracy, semantics, and dawdling politicians. Even one of the characters in the early minutes of the film complains about all the red-tape. These drawn-out scenes and cultural dissonance can make it difficult to stay invested in the film.

But if you’ve got the patience to let the build-up play out, Shin Godzilla rewards audiences with a dramatic vision of destruction in the city of Tokyo. I was reminded particularly of some Japanese mega-monsters from older animated stories like the Angels of Neon Genesis Evangelion or the God-Warrior from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. There’s something about these kaiju that is dehumanizing, and this is where Shin Godzilla really shines. Unlike a lot of other depictions of Godzilla, Toho’s latest iteration is soulless. It hardly responds to any human action or obstacle in its path, and as one character puts it, “it just walks!” With a downright biblical score composed by Shiro Sagisu (who coincidentally also composed the NGE and Attack on Titan scores), the images of Godzilla slowly trampling through Tokyo take on an apocalyptic tone.

The allusions associated with Godzilla are clear; whereas previous iterations could easily be interpreted as a metaphor for nuclear weapons, or the arbiter of traditional Japanese values, this version of Godzilla is a symbol for the catastrophes of 2011 Tohoku earthquake and the reactor meltdown at Fukushima. Some shots of workers helping refugee citizens in the wrecked city are indistinguishable from news footage in the weeks and months after those disasters. The motif is found throughout the film: in the blue jumpsuits and white hard-hats of rescue workers to the brave volunteers who risk their lives in hopes of stopping radiation contamination in the city.

Overall, I was impressed with the film. Toho did a great job in reinventing Godzilla with pieces of the last generations. Shin Godzilla is a good kaiju movie to be sure, but it’s also a compelling monument to the strength of the Japanese people in recovering from horrific environmental disaster. It’s on limited-release, so you may have a hard time finding it – but if you do, I definitely recommend it.

Image from the FUNImation Godzilla: Resurgence trailer, which can be viewed here.