Hacker Cinema
Shin Godzilla
シン・ゴジラ
2016 · Film · 120 min
Directed by Shinji Higuchi, Hideaki Anno
When a massive, gilled monster emerges from the deep and tears through the city, the government scrambles to save its citizens. A rag-tag team of volunteers cuts through a web of red tape to uncover the monster's weakness and its mysterious ties to a foreign superpower. But time is not on their side - the greatest catastrophe to ever befall the world is about to evolve right before their very eyes.
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9 comments on Hacker News
I’m imagining the folks from Shin Godzilla.
I assume that movie is for Japanese civil servants like the show Silicon Valley is for programmers. Stuff like the repeated meeting-room changes for no apparent reason reads as too specific and weird to be made-up.
If you have a change to visit the Tokyo Science Museum, it's quite good in this respect - it has a lot of interactive displays, many of which are very hands on, and some are application based - focused on how the science concepts are used in industry (with some occasional corporate tie-ins, which weren't too over the top). It's fairly kid focused, as others have mentioned - most of your competition for seeing the exhibits will be school student groups.
Incidentally, the building is featured near the end of the Shin Godzilla movie.
I dunno, 2015, I'm a little weak on this year: It Follows, Creed, Ex Machina, Max Max: Fury Road, Sicario, The Hateful 8. I'd watch those again with someone any time, and recommend all of them often. Several on my to-watch list most of which I expect to be good, like Queen of the Desert, While We're Young, Slow West, and The Overnight, just haven't made it to them yet. Not an exhaustive list, just gleaned from some titles I have at hand.
2016: Green Room, The Nice Guys, Hail Caesar!, The Neon Demon, Swiss Army Man, Hunt for the Wilder People, The VVitch, Train to Busan, Shin Godzilla, Moana (hey, I like this one), Arrival. Moonlight's on my to-watch and is supposed to be really good.
2017 (I've done OK on catching up with these!): The Lost City of Z, Dunkirk, Low Life, Good Time, Logan Lucky (absolutely slept on, kills it as a feel-good lightweight small-stakes heist movie), Blade Runner 2049, The Death of Stalin (I liked this less than a lot of folks, but given how widely-loved it was, I'm probably the idiot here), One Cut of the Dead, You Were Never Really Here. The Planet of the Apes movie from that year, plus Phantom Thread, and The Little Hours are to-watch for me and come highly recommended.
2018: Annihilation, Isle of Dogs, Upgrade, Sorry to Bother You, High Life, Eighth Grade, the Suspiria remake. To-watch that I expect to be good include Champion (Korean arm wrestling movie—there's another movie by the same name that year), First Reformed, BlacKkKLansman, The Favourite, The Wolf House, Climax, and some others.
2019: HUGE year for the particular (small) set I'm seeing on my list, including a ton to-watch but a bunch I've seen. Uncut Gems, The Lighthouse, Knives Out, Little Women, JoJo Rabbit, Ready or Not, Parasite, Midsommar, The Art of Self Defense, maybe Marriage Story (but if you've seen one Baumbach movie, you've kinda seen them all, and I'm not sure I'd put it above The Squid and the Whale). Midway's a well-above-average war movie and pairs great with Tora, Tora, Tora! as a crazy-long double feature in a really fun way. To-watch list is nuts and I really need to dedicate a month or so to filling out my watched-list for this year: First Cow, The Irishman, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Bacurau, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Farewell, The Souvenir, Blow the Man Down, The Vast of Night, Her Smell, Funan.
It basically just keeps going like that, year after year, and I've barely even tried to dredge up good movies for most of those years, the bulk of it's just stuff that's risen to my attention one way or another, and I'm terrible at keeping up with foreign film especially. I also left off some that a lot of folks would probably include, like at least one Mission Impossible (aside from MI2, I think these are all pretty good action movies, though quality varies a bit) and Avengers: Endgame which, opinion on the rest of Marvel aside (I think it's mostly kinda lazy crap? But was basically entertained for most of them regardless, so I guess I can't complain too much) was a hell of an event. Also Black Panther, which everyone loved but I was pretty meh on (I hate the entire end fight, and it's looooong)
I think I can apply your last two paragraphs to pretty much any movie unintentionally celebrating the United States security apparatus, politics, public policy, or exploitative crony capitalism that that people lust over for whatever reason.
"That said, there are clear problems with the political narrative in the film Oppenheimer, given that it's supposed to be artwork. Making a film about a nuclear weapon without in any way extensively showcasing the result of it's use on a civilian population i.e. the consequences of the development of that weapon is extremely American and morally dubious at best...downright propaganda at worst. Were the American public and military rank and file the real victims of WW2 ()? Is it ok to pronounce the moral ambiguity of the top brass without commenting on the Holocaust-level crimes committed?
These things were glaring in the theater. And I know I'm going to get the standard 'MAGA move to a Commie country' for having an honest appraisal of the conceptual idea. But it's bad in that way. ..."
War is a complex issue and making a film about Japan's war crimes (the first installment of the Ip Man series was good with this) is something which has to be met with approval from its government who have their hands in film finance as well. Japan is not exactly a capitalist economy-- it is culturally a command economy and everyone listens to the government (this is actually one of the critiques of Shin Godzilla and even if this Godzilla movie).
There are not that many governments that are going to be thrilled about you making a movie shitting on their armed forces or speaking on their war crimes. In the United States, our first amendment protects give us tremendous leeway to do this, but there is a lot of other pressures which can be extorted to kill a film prior to release.
Scorcese recently released Killers of the Flower Moon, which is not about a Holocaust, but about a limited genocide, and people are already bitching about the length, and it is as long as a "rah rah America" Avengers movie. This kind of movie was hard to make in the United States. It would be impossible to make in Japan. People there have to use metaphors to talk about getting nuked (aside from Grave of the Fireflies showing the Tokyo Firebombing, which was worse). How are you supposed to use a metaphor for an Asian Holocaust? If they did it would it come off as insensitive to a Western viewer?
This is a political Godzilla movie. It's a movie about Japan dealing with post war recovery. Maybe next time, there will be a Godzilla who comes and frees all the slave labor in the Imphal India campaign (maybe involve the Indian film industry to reduce cost). Maybe you should pitch it to be developed here with US political assistance and pressure so that Japanese war crimes are addressed. It's certainly a good idea.
But I would hesitate from: -- being a hypocrite. -- critiquing simplistically without seeing the larger work of this director.
Just rewatched that scene (happens at around 1:16:00). The first time I watched that scene in particular I had to pause it because I was flabbergasted that they were so clearly breaking the fourth wall.
After the... unfortunate opening scene of the movie I hadn't rewatched it but every time I see even a small clip of anything from Eva (the movie or the show) I'm just enamored. Hideaki Anno is one of the greatest artists of our time just from NGE and Shin Godzilla. It felt like every frame of the original anime was perfect.
The creator of the series definitely thinks a lot about Hiroshima and the occupation. Its extremely evident in the live action movie Shin Godzilla that he also directed (its a great movie, check it out if you can, very unlike any Godzilla movie I've seen before). Not to spoil too much but the postwar relationship between the US and Japan is a major theme and the film includes a 10 second silent cutaway where photographs of the destruction of Hiroshima/Nagasaki are shown.
> "If the Japanese, with their image of professionalism, smartness, ultra advanced technology, and total dedication to their job"
You're just cherrypicking positive stereotypes while ignoring negative stereotypes relevant to the matter, such as the trait of not making waves with your superiors and papering over problems to avoid embarrassment. These themes are explored in Shin Godzilla, which was a huge commercial success in Japan, undoubtedly because the Japanese public recognized some truth in how the movie depicted government incompetence in Japan.
You would like Shin Godzilla then! It's a movie that specifically shows teams working (some badly, some well) against a fatal threat
I feel like I'm going to be one of the few (if only) dissenting voices against everyone else here: I actually LIKE the screens in the back of the chair in front of me. My general experience with them for long flights, while buggy with a bad screen, etc. has been very good. This is due to what is generally a pretty good selection of movies, often with many I haven't seen but know about and would like to see, or fun surprises that I would have never considered otherwise. (example: I got to see "Shin Godzilla" on a flight to Japan recently. I had never heard about it, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting movies I saw of the multiple I selected, and just generally a very interesting movie in general with strong commentary against the government's handling of the power plant disaster) These turn out to be very beneficial for me, as when I'm on a long plane ride I often "shut down" and don't want to do anything except brainlessly watch movies or potentially read certain books that suck me in very well. On the long flights to Australia and Japan I've done recently this has allowed the flight to pass quickly and easily for me.
I'm sad to see them go. I don't want to watch movies on some silly app on my phone which is much smaller than the screens now. I want to use my phone to read books and save the battery charge for texting people or driving when I land.