Updating the Legendary Monster for the CGI Generation, ‘Shin Godzilla: ORTHOchromatic’ Is Exciting, Funny, and Suitably Awesome

Movie fans may recall the 1980s controversy surrounding the colorization of black-and-white movies. When Ted Turner purchased the film inventories of MGM, Warner Brothers, and RKO, the media mogul was intent on draping color onto chiaroscuro. The idea of “King Kong” (1933) and “Casablanca” (1942) festooned with rainbow palettes raised hackles. Mr. Turner didn’t flinch: “The last time I checked, I owned the films … I can do whatever I want with them.”Ah, the arrogance of capital. Colorization prompted Jimmy Stewart to write a letter to Congress, calling the process “wrong, completely wrong … insulting and unfair.” A film critic for the New York Times, Vincent Canby, opined that the process made films “take on the look of a tinted Victorian postcard.” Scuttlebutt has it that Orson Welles’s last wish before going to his great reward was to prevent Mr. Turner from adding color to “Citizen Kane” (1941).We’ve come a long way since then — not that things have gotten any less complicated. Advances in technology have already de-aged Harrison Ford in the recent “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (2023) and will allow sportscaster Al Michaels’s voice to be used for this summer’s Olympic Games. There’s more where that came from, but few people have taken note of a less splashy tendency on the part of some filmmakers: rendering their color movies into black-and-white.A Korean filmmaker, Bong Joon-ho, re-released his Best Picture winner “Parasite” (2019) in monochrome. Guillermo del Toro did the same, albeit on a limited basis, with “Nightmare Alley” (2021). Profit wasn’t a motive. Foreign audiences tend to be wary of movies bereft of color; younger audiences dismiss black-and-white films as markers of less enlightened times. Still, Mr. Joon-ho notes that there’s an element of prestige in shucking color: Classics, in his estimation, are black-and white. That’s what he saw on his family’s TV growing up, and that’s the way it is.The latest addition to this cadre of colorless pictures is Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s “Shin Godzilla” (2016). Now titled “Shin Godzilla: ORTHOmatic,” the picture is having its American premiere as part of “Japan Cuts 2024,” the Japan Society’s 17th annual festival of films from the mainland. A bevy of directors and actors will be on hand, including Tomoko Tabata, the featured performer in a film to be reviewed in these pages upon its American release later this month at Film at Lincoln Center, “Moving” (1993).So, Gojira. I didn’t much attend to last year’s “Godzilla Minus One,” a picture that a colleague, A.R. Hoffman, dubbed “the best in film this year.” A pioneer in kaiju fandom, Bradford Grant Boyle, sent along a note that both “Godzilla Minus One” and “Shin Godzilla” had redeemed the oversized icon of post-Hiroshima Japan: “Big G is back!” Given that I hadn’t watched a Godzilla film since middle-school, I was doubtful. How much leisure time and disposable income could be merited by an oversized radioactive lizard?It is a pleasure to report that “Shin Godzilla: ORTHOchromatic” is a fascinating bit of filmmaking. Messrs. Anno and Higuchi have crafted a rigorous movie, a story that concerns itself as much with the political response to disaster as it does with a fire-breathing monster wreaking havoc in Tokyo. The special effects make a definite nod to the rubber suits of yore while updating them for the CGI generation. The directors gave this movie a lot of forethought and it shows.The picture has taken on additional meaning in a post-Covid world, particularly as it applies to the machinations of governmental bureaucracy and the intricacies of international relations. America is a player here and the butt of not a few jokes. Yet it is France — the land of Descartes, Voltaire, and Montaigne — that proves vital in determining Godzilla’s fate. Who would have thunk it?Although the denouement of the picture proved anticlimactic and the black-and-white cinematography murky, “Shin Godzilla: ORTHOchromatic” is exciting, funny, and suitably awesome when our title character does its thing. By the time this article is posted, tickets at Japan Society will likely be sold out, so mark your 2025 calendar for the official American release in January and plan on marveling at the resilience of a pop culture mainstay.

Updating the Legendary Monster for the CGI Generation, ‘Shin Godzilla: ORTHOchromatic’ Is Exciting, Funny, and Suitably Awesome

Updating the Legendary Monster for the CGI Generation, ‘Shin Godzilla: ORTHOchromatic’ Is Exciting, Funny, and Suitably Awesome

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