Shin Godzilla: The King of the Monsters, Starting From Scratch

Garrett Stiger

Garrett is an entertainment professional living in the Los Angeles area.

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7 Responses

  1. greginak says:

    SG was a very good movie. As Kaiju lover it is inspiring to see how Godzilla can stay relevant, new and entertaining decades after he started. I certainly hope the Japanese studio takes the big guy back. GvsK was good but who cares about the big monkey. We ( i’m speaking for all right thinking people here) want to see more of the Big G. But i digress. Shin is very much worth seeing.Report

    • That was my thought as well, regarding the resilience and elasticity of Godzilla as a character. With “Shin Godzilla,” we have one of the best in the series coming out 62 years after the original!

      And on Toho, my understanding is that they are free to start making Godzilla movies again. (Their deal with Legendary didn’t allow them to go into production on anything until 2020.) Though I know Toho is also very supportive of the American Godzilla. We’ll see what the future holds, but we may see two studios producing titles simultaneously featuring the monster.

      Thanks for reading!Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to greginak says:

      I loathe the insistence of studios pitting Kong against Godzilla. It’s pointless.Report

  2. Brandon Berg says:

    “Shin” doesn’t have a direct English translation, but it roughly means “true” or “god.”

    This is worthy of elaboration, because it’s pretty cool. Japanese has a limited phonemic inventory compared to Chinese (five vowels, ten consonants, no tonal distinctions), and pretty strict rules for combining them into syllables, so when they started incorporating Chinese loan-words into their language (of which there are many; Japanese : Chinese :: English : Latin is a good analogy), they ended up with a ton of Chinese characters that sound exactly the same in Japanese. One of the more common readings is “shin” (pronounced “sheen”); approximately 30 of the 2045 characters designated for regular use can be read this way.

    Normally this isn’t a problem; most Chinese loan words have two or more characters, which cuts down on homophones, and in writing the characters can be distinguished visually.

    So my initial reaction to the line quoted above is that it was nonsense; 真 (true) and 神 (god) are totally different words, and it would be obvious from the way the title was written which it was.

    In fact, it’s not obvious at all, because the title is written phonetically (シン・ゴジラ), making the meaning unclear even to Japanese people. The most obvious candidates are 新 (new) and 真 (true). 神 (god) strikes me as a bit less likely because it’s not often used as a prefix, but still a solid candidate. If you think about it a bit more, you might think of 進, which evokes the idea of advancement or evolution, or 侵 (invasion).

    This is a great publicity gimmick, because it gets people thinking and talking about what it could mean. The official word from the director seems to be that there’s no one right answer and that it could be any or all of the above.Report

  3. Saul Degraw says:

    I saw this movie a few years ago. I concur about Kayoco Anne Patterson. The actress was very uncomfortable at delivering lines in English. It seemed mainly like a way to get in some anti-American swipes into the movie to soften the criticisms of Japanese government.Report