i've read some excellent reviews right here, which said everything i wanted to. kudos. i am incoherent now, basking in the "this. this is it!" feeling. this movie is everything the hollywood ones were not - even though the second tried to be, on some level... on a personal, heartstrings-pulling-bullshit-slinging level that was completely the wrong choice. there is no main character here, and especially no main character's family(!), and no heroics. like train to busan, but overtly and nuanced, this is a movie that is critical of bureaucratic reaction to disaster. but it's a much, much better movie than that implies: bureaucracy is not a monolith, but a chain, and it's not evil, but earnestly flawed. sg is more interested in the way links come together, in seniority, face-saving, priorities, who gets to speak to whom and who gets listened over others. this might make it sound like not much of a kaiju movie, but it is. it's also a much more effective disaster movie than the hollywood ones. it has the guts to recall actual disasters that hit japan, as previous gojira movies did. there isn't any disaster porn here, no prolonged cheesy scenes involving children and dogs and last second escapes that would make the audience cheer. the shots showing citizens and destruction from their pov are brief, often news-like, and eerily realistic. and then, halfway thru shin godzilla, godzilla fired the trademark blast. i've watched evangelion, so i thought i knew what to expect; i still felt it in my guts, wrenching in a way not even one second in gareth edwards' movie was. any flaws? well, the special effects: the first godzilla form looked awful (those eyes, wtf? it looked like a puppet.) this is pretty much everything it had to be. i don't even know why i'm not rating it 5/5 except for the fact that i obsess over perfekshun. isn't this the perfect godzilla movie though? it sure is.