Asintelligence: What the Rock Has to Say about Nuclear Anxiety

Opening with a French nuclear weapons test that irradiates a Polynesian iguana nest and thus unleashes the movie’s namesake upon New York City decades later, the film is a supersized cautionary tale that largely overlooks the post-Second World War anxieties of previous Godzilla films. Instead, the terrible freak show is deployed to exploit audience appetites for metropolitan disaster, espionage, cover-ups, and the power plays of two fencing heavyweights. The closing shot, in which Godzilla’s sole progeny emerges from a destroyed Madison Square Garden, left eight-year-old me fraught with radiation worries, and it took decades to find a way to escape the sense of impending doom and the infinite, horrifying possibilities of what would one day come for me and everyone I love.