Upon initial release in 2016, Shin Godzilla — the product of co-directors Hideaki Anno (creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion) and Shinji Higuchi (storyboard/SFX artist) — was a sizeable return to form for the series, out-grossing the 2014 U.S. franchise reboot, registering as the second-highest-grossing film domestically behind Your Name., and taking the mantle of the then most financially successful Godzilla film to date. Anno and Higuchi would end production eager to get to work on a sequel, which the former had drafted during filming under the name “Sequel Shin Godzilla Memo” and sent off to Toho. There would be no response. Instead, Toho would create a “Godzilla Room,” made up of a closed group of 14 members, appointed the task of establishing rules for the franchise and future creature features, including that Godzilla must never die and “prey on people or things.” With such rules established, Toho would pivot, and in 2023 Godzilla Minus One was released, quickly becoming the franchise’s most successful film.
Despite the seeming antipathy at the executive level for Shin Godzilla, the release of Godzilla Minus One in Japan in late 2023, coordinated to honor the character’s 70th anniversary, also occasioned a series of special screenings chosen by its director, Takashi Yamazaki, to celebrate the series to date. Yamazaki opted for Godzilla (1954); Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster; Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, and finally Shin Godzilla: Orthochromatic (or, in the Japanese, simply Ortho) — an idea conceived by Hideaki Anno exclusively for the celebration that would see the film given the black-and-white treatment.
Before speaking to the experiment in monochrome that Anno carried out with his work, a brief foray into the work itself and the reasons for Toho’s aversion for a film that was a critical and runaway financial success should be attempted. In speaking to the latter point, we are left only with conjecture adduced from the film itself. The work portrays, unsurprisingly, a reptilian sea creature (Godzilla, for the uninitiated) making landfall in Japan after being exposed, it becomes clear, to large quantities of U.S.-dumped nuclear radiation. Chaos ensues, destruction is meted out, mysteries of halting the monster’s self-evolutionary capabilities are combated, and the day is eventually won. So far, so innocuous, and yet it cannot go unstated that Anno and Higuchi’s means of unraveling this plot are deeply idiosyncratic. In its early stretches, Shin Godzilla resembles the farcical stylings of Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop and The Thick of It, operating as a pitch-black bureaucratic comedy of errors that, at once, portrays the Japanese populace as one trivializing of the meaning of disaster and its government officials as both wholly inept for the task at hand and impotent in the face of it due to geopolitical arrangements. The results are truly biting, not least given that the heroes that carry the film forward to victory cut a severely alienated lot, be it a Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary (Hiroki Hasegawa) or a cadre of genius scientists (e.g., Shinya Tsukamoto and Mikako Ichikawa). The protagonists here are almost entirely devoid of substance, capable only of pure patriotic function as they seek an art of combined warfare that integrates the civil with the military.
The results of this are, indeed, stirring and complex. At once, positionally, a critique of political incompetence as the first Japan-made Godzilla film following the 2011 Fukushima crisis, while also serving as a commentary on the coincidence of opposites in its presentation of heroic service of the nation: the finest people serve the country that gives them identity, while the nation strips these very people of any identity. This is not unfamiliar territory for Anno, as Neon Genesis Evangelion had previously explored the instrumentalization of its heroes, yet it’s nonetheless intriguing that it’s in the realm of live action that the possibility of it appears almost entirely absent — with the film’s terrifying closing shot, depicting skeletal figures arrayed over the corpse of Godzilla, indicating that for all a people may muster, a fundamental aspect of their being remains sacrificial.
The remaining matter for discussion is, of course, the new presentation of the work. In its color version, the film is impressive if not especially remarkable in on an particular aesthetic basis. The creature design does stand out, and the range of cameras and shooting techniques employed and strategies for image-making in the use of composites and VFX demonstrates the work of love on a budgetary level. Yet, the new black-and-white edition renders certain aspects of Shin Godzilla all the fiercer, more primordial and Manichean, tying the work as much to the original film in the series as it does to a tremendous horror in its own ideas about the nature of the human in relation to catastrophe. Indeed, while the naming convention of “orthochromatic” — which refers in the first place to the production of natural tones of light and shade in a photographic image — may seem chiefly floral for a film captured digitally, it is perhaps in a second sense of the term that a deeper meaning is found: which is to say, in images developed that are sensitive to all colors but red. And when the reader considers the severity of the ambiguities surrounding Japanese identity within the work, it’s provocative to think to what degree Anno wishes us to imagine a land on which the rising sun no longer falls. Put differently, and as a conclusive word, it’s in this that we perhaps come closer to understanding why Toho didn’t green-light a sequel.
