Watching ¡°Shin Godzilla,¡± Toho¡¯s reboot of its signature monster series, I couldn¡¯t help feeling sorry for the non-Japanese fans forced to read a blizzard of subtitles for this extremely talky and densely populated film, with a break every 10 minutes or so for Godzilla rampages ¡ª the real reason they bought the tickets.
But those rampages ¡ª staged by effects veteran Shinji Higuchi and his team, with co-director and sci-fi/fantasy maestro Hideaki Anno supervising ¡ª are worth the wait. Working with a fraction of the budget that Hollywood CGI spectacles get, they have created scenes of frighteningly realistic destruction, with a beast that has evolved far from his ¡°man in a suit¡± origins of Ishiro Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya¡¯s 1954 original ¡°Godzilla.¡±
Similar to that film, ¡°Shin Godzilla¡± unfolds in a contemporary Japan that has never heard of Godzilla. When the beast first makes its presence known in Tokyo Bay in the form of strange rumblings, water sprays and a catastrophic tunnel flooding, the authorities scramble to come up with answers ¡ª and decide the cause is a volcanic eruption.
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