The depiction of Tokyo in Shin Godzilla

For the discussion of Shin Godzilla, Godzilla -1.0, the anime trilogy, Godzilla Singular Point and Toho produced and distributed films after 2015. Includes US movies financed by Toho like Detective Pikachu.
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ray243
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The depiction of Tokyo in Shin Godzilla

Post by ray243 »

One thing I enjoy about Shin Godzilla is that it really tries its best to depict Tokyo from the POV of your average resident living there. It avoids some of the trap most Hollywood productions falls into when it comes to depicting big cities in a blockbuster movie. Most of the time, those cities just feel like a generic city that doesn't feel like the actual real life location.

This is usually because Hollywood likes to use other cities like Vancouver as a stand in for more famous cities like New York and etc. Even in Godzilla 2014, they were using US locations to depict Japan. While the sets are impressive, they never really managed to sell the idea that these is an actual location in Japan. Instead, they often feels like this is a very generic "fake city".

Shin Godzilla tries its best to go to actual location and simply digitally composite Godzilla into those scenes. Even those scenes where an entire suburbs have to be recreated via CGI, they aim to make the place look as close to the real world location as possible. The end result is a monster movie where you can probably visit the exact spot the where Shin Godzilla walked through. For anyone living in that area, it would have given you a surreal experience of what a real-life Godzilla marching through your home would be like.

The movie avoids the temptation of having Godzilla simply walking to the big iconic landmarks or downtown Tokyo. By drawing more attention away from the city center, it creates the feeling of Godzilla being more "real" and dangerous to the audience. A big monster movie can have tons of tower blocks, but if they don't correspond to any real life residential locations, these movies will lose some of its effectiveness. Kaiju movies works best when they actually render real life location as accurately as possible.

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Maritonic
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Re: The depiction of Tokyo in Shin Godzilla

Post by Maritonic »

ray243 wrote:It avoids some of the trap most Hollywood productions falls into
Probably because it's not a Hollywood production?
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