Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Japan recovering post-war was already nightmarish enough for the citizens that survived on the home islands and for any military personnel that made it back.
Godzilla simply adds on to the nightmare the Japanese living in Tokyo thought they were just getting over.
The trailers
- The trailers alone provide plenty of reason to be terrified of this incarnation of Godzilla and his Unstoppable Rage. What makes this one different? He wants to kill humans. And not incidentally killing humans; he's targeting humans specifically. Most other incarnations of Godzilla only attack people when provoked, and even then sometimes (such as in the MonsterVerse, for the most part) he still doesn't. This Godzilla, though, is all but explicitly evil. And as the film itself goes on, you will not be rooting for him to win or survive in some way this time around.
- As countless civilians in a street in Tokyo desperately try to run away from the monster, Godzilla simply turns around, his sweeping tail plowing through a row of buildings and the resulting debris collapsing upon the masses. Not helped by how Godzilla seems to be speeding it up by turning faster as he does. It also doesn't help that the debris and the tail are coming right at the camera.
- With a single step, Godzilla displaces the pavement, sending slabs of concrete and asphalt upwards — and sending people flying. We don't get to see them land on the ground or if they're in any shape to keep running from a monster so close and so intent on killing them.
- A building breaks apart and falls to the ground, and the camera sticks with the rooftop, along with the people who had escaped to the doomed building in desperation.
- One overhead shot shows Godzilla directly stepping on some fleeing people, something that Godzilla films have largely avoided showing. Knowing this Godzilla's hatred for humans, he's clearly crushing them on purpose. It does not help that the audio for the crowd's screams become louder when he steps on them.
- The fact that the camera is seeing these from the perspective of the fleeing civilians makes it so much worse. The audience is forced to share in the terror and despair that they are experiencing.
- Related to the above point: An explosion — very likely a third nuclear weapon — goes off in front of Godzilla. But we see it from the perspective of the Japanese unfortunate enough to be caught in the blast radius, who watch in despair as the shockwave heads right for them. Then we see the shockwave disintegrate entire city blocks. It's the same worst-case scenario that people were fighting to avoid in Shin Godzilla — except it becomes a reality in this film, and at the worst possible time.
- Later trailers propose an even worse possibility: this is just what Godzilla's Atomic Breath does now. But wait, it somehow gets even worse than that! Assuming that the events of the latest trailer are accurate, Godzilla used this massive overkill attack to destroy four tanks. That's akin to using a bunker buster to deal with gophers!
- Confirmed. His Breath Weapon is now effectively a nuclear bomb, and he used to it destroy four tanks (and kill as many people as he could). And the destruction is shown from the POV of the people on the ground.
- Further, we see the pressure wave destroying and sending debris a mile or so away from the impact point. Then we see a lot of that debris flying back the other way. This implies Godzilla superheated the air so much that it created a vacuum like a lightning bolt does.
- Like in the original, Godzilla bites down on a train, where it hangs helplessly from his mouth. However, in this film, we also see this from inside one of the cars, where Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe) holds on for dear life as one end of the cabin breaks off and falls, leaving little to block Oishi from potentially falling to her doom, as the other passengers around her had.
- The October 18 teaser has a glimpse of Godzilla coming up on a fishing boat in the open sea, with one character firing a mounted machine gun directly at the monster's half-submerged face. And yet, Godzilla only glares back at these little ants in his waters.
- This Godzilla is about 50 meters tall, like the 1954 original. This incarnation of the Kaiju King — who has dealt such cruel destruction and slaughter upon Japan — is shorter than Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Earth, yet that makes the destruction he causes feel much more personal and deliberate.
- The charge-up sequence for the Atomic Breath now has a new wrinkle. While the blue glow is still here and even travels up from the tip of his tail like his Monstervese incarnation, but now Godzilla's dorsal spines now painfully extend from his back at the same time before slamming back in to release it. Not so nightmarish, and even awesome on its own, but a number of viewers have noticed that this process bears a striking resemblance to how the control rods of a nuclear reactor function. It's been said throughout the franchise that Godzilla's heart is essentially a nuclear reactor, but this marks the first time it's been taken so literally.
The film
- This film takes place two years after the end of World War II, meaning that this Japan is the least equipped to fend off Godzilla in 1947. In fact, this Japan is less equipped than its equivalent in the 1954 original: there's no Self-Defense Force, for example. They're at "zero", and nothing can stop Godzilla from dragging them into the "minus state" before the film's end.
- As Shikishima is looking out toward the ocean on Odo Island, he notices something odd: deep-sea fish floating up to the surface, dead due to their internal guts have expanded out from the decompression. As it turns out later, it's a sign of Godzilla's passage through deep waters. So it must've been lurking around the island again for about half a day before attacking...
- Even before being mutated, Godzilla, a large dinosaur-like sea monster, proves terrifying. He's introduced with a Jump Scare by a mechanic shining a spotlight on him, revealing he's already on land. Not only that, he's extremely aggressive, and kills by clamping his jaws down on helpless people and flinging them away.
- The Japanese engineers posted to Odo Island aren't expecting an American attack on their position, let alone an attack from a monster. When they start breaking under the pressure of Godzilla slowly approaching them, most of them just start firing their rifles in panic, getting its attention. As they scatter, Godzilla squashes and bites down on them left and right. One even tries to lure Godzilla back into a frozen Shikishima's line of fire, only for Godzilla to snatch the poor guy in its maw and toss him away.
- The entire sequence shows that Godzilla is something the audience should be terrified of, not cheering for. Godzilla doesn't play with his "food"; he kills the mechanics with absolute unpity, one by one, and it seems like Shikishima might actually get crushed next. By the time it's over, the tension and oppressive atmosphere are replaced with relief mixed with dread of the aftermath. The audience is glad that Godzilla is gone.
- Godzilla as seen in the Odo attack is particularly unsettling. It's his hunched over posture and the almost burnt-looking appearance to his scales, contrasting with his upright posture later on in the film and in most other versions of the character. Whereas even the infamous 1998 American film's take still looks like it could somewhat reasonably be a take on Godzilla as an authentic dinosaur, with the same horizontal posture as the Tyrannosaurus from Jurassic Park (1993) as opposed to the kangaroo-like tripod stance he normally has, here he almost evokes even older paleoart where dinosaurs were explicitly monstrous, the kind of thing that you should be very, very glad is extinct. He borders on being an Animalistic Abomination in this sequence.
- Also, after the attack, one can see the bodies of the mechanics. One is apparently missing his lower half, with one there’s a dip in the middle…
- Making this all worse is something that not a lot of folks notice until a repeat viewing. When the tower searchlight hits Godzilla the first time you'll see four scars along his neckline that are already healing up. That means there's something out there that can hurt him before his mutation... and who's to know if it didn't also get hit by the Atomic Bomb as well.
- A sign Godzilla is nearby is when the corpses of deep-sea fishes brought up by his movement float up. Thanks to the rapid pressure changes, the fishes' organs inflate out of their mouths, creating both an eerie and gross omen.
- For the first time ever in a Japanese Godzilla film, we see Godzilla actually hit with an atomic bomb during the US's Operation Crossroads tests, with a close shot of his flesh boiling and his eyes melting.
- The boat chase scene. Four guys on a rickety old wooden fishing boat, in the middle of the ocean, with a massive city-destroying kaiju right on their tail and gaining. All they have to defend themselves with is a pair of sea mines and a mounted machine gun. Godzilla ignores the first mine, and the gun without so much as a scratch. Then they get the idea to blow up from the inside, and set the second mine into his mouth. But the detonator wire gets severed in the confusion, so Shikishima has to desperately try to blow the mine up with the gun. It succeeds at blowing a hole in Godzilla's mouth...but the wound regenerates in seconds. The only reason the crew survived was because the Takao saved the day, and the heavy cruiser was still demolished by Godzilla.
- Bear in mind that one of the Shinsei Maru crew, Mizushima, is the youngest of the bunch, having just been a year or more underage of being recruited for the war. Here, he's clearly terrified of the massive beast coming after them. When that second mine fails to go off, he can only yell "What?! No! No!" as he scrambles to retrieve the wire. And when the Takao arrives, Mizushima's awe is soon quashed as Godzilla proves resilient against the ship, soon obliterating it with its Atomic Breath.
- The way Godzilla moves. His oversized legs lurching forward while his upper body remains largely static, making only small and constrained movements. Combined with his more horrifying Atomic Breath yet, it’s made clear that, just like Shin before him, this Godzilla is also in pain just from existing.
- One example of this is a comparison between his original build and his post-mutation build. At the start Godzilla's stance is exaggerated but somewhat accurate to the modern understanding of theropod dinosaurs (hips semi-parallel to the ground and digitigrade feet). After the atomic bomb, however, he's forced into this hyper-upright stance that his body was not built for, giving him the equivalent of a perpetual case of arthritis in his hips and ankles as they strain to take his weight.
- Despite Godzilla's pain though, he's still more animated than Shin was throughout his entire movie. This Godzilla is the embodiment of "I'm in pain so I'm going to make it everyone else's problem".
- The roar, dear god. It takes the unnatural bellow from the 1954 film and amplifies it tenfold to terrifying effect. It sounds like a wildfire, a bomb, and nails on a chalkboard were thrown into a blender, with a result that can only be described as deafening.
- Sound designer Natsuko Inoue created the roar used here by playing the 1954 roar through massive speakers in an empty stadium. Both she and Takashi Yamazaki were chilled by the sound, with the latter mentioning "I felt a shiver in the pit of my stomach when I thought that people who actually saw Godzilla would hear this sound".
- Godzilla's Atomic Breath takes the nuclear bomb comparison and runs with it to both amazing and terrifying results. His spines glow blue and rise out of his body with a visceral squelch before they all slam down at once almost like a gun's hammer. The beam itself is not a continuous stream of energy, but a singular blast that evaporates nearby structures by the sheer concussive force before the impact point erupts into a titanic mushroom cloud. Godzilla himself is not immune to his own tremendous power either, the very act of firing the beam chars his body, leaving sections of his face and neck carbonized before his regeneration kicks in.
- After barely surviving the shockwaves of Godzilla's atomic breath, Shikishima hobbles out of an alleyway to find that the block has been completely razed. As he turns to see Godzilla, the monster is simply staring at the destruction he's caused as a massive mushroom cloud rises from what once was several city blocks. To put it mildly, Japan has just been hit with a third nuclear attack, and the metaphor for Godzilla as a walking nuclear weapon has never been conveyed more terrifyingly before. And Godzilla looks at the massive cloud of dust and debris his signature attack has kicked up, and roars. As if he's reveling in the death, destruction, and terror he's just wrought. Not long afterwards, as Shikishima is screaming in agony, pitch-black rain begins to fall, further driving home the visual similarities to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- Historically, any human victories against Godzilla have needed something fantastical to come out on top, be it a new chemical, another monster, a mecha, or massive amounts of blood coagulant. So what miracle weapon has been developed to deal with Godzilla this time? Nothing. There isn't one. In a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, Japan is too crippled for that kind of development. What they do have is even more horrifying for its basis in reality: real-life physics and biology. The plan is to kill Godzilla with a phenomenon that happens in our reality to deep-sea life when they're rapidly brought to the surface, namely, sudden rapid pressure changes. The plan is to use a sort of belt rigged with freon gas canisters to rapidly sink Godzilla to subject him to explosive compression, and if that fails, use a set of oversized inflatable life rafts to rapidly surface him to subject him to explosive decompression. It very nearly works as, just like a real-life deep-sea fish, by the end of this sequence Godzilla is left in a state even more horrifying than Shin was: his blood vessels and tissues rupture and his eyes pop out of his skull. But, he isn’t dead. When the boats manage to pull him to the surface, he’s critically injured and gruesomely mutilated, but he’s now well and truly furious, and almost nothing will stop him from enacting his revenge…
- This incarnation of Godzilla has more than a few unnerving similarities to King Ghidorah (or Mechagodzilla). Tyrannical lizard kaiju? Check. Deliberately goes out of his way to destroy as many humans as possible? Check. Insane Healing Factor which means the most his enemies can do is obliterate his body, which still leads him to being Not Quite Dead? Check.
- It's a small one, but Godzilla moving his head and his eyes in perfect sync with Shikishima's plane as it flies overhead, during the finale. Him tracking the plane is downright unsettling.
- While the revelation that Noriko survived is a heartwarming moment, the scene shows that she has developed black markings around her neck, which suggests either radiation poisoning... or as a pamphlet tells she was mutated by Godzilla's radiation hence surviving the blast, which while she might have developed a Healing Factor, it could very well hint a dark path in her future.
- The film ends with a shot of Godzilla's remains sinking into the sea...but he's Not Quite Dead: he's already beginning to regenerate!
