A heavy hitter for this franchise, Godzilla always works best as a channel of Japan’s social and political anxieties and it’s impossible to separate this from the Fukushima disaster only half a decade prior. Surely that experience for Japan—like 9/11 for Americans—was captured, remembered and reinterpreted by the media landscape of the time. If the shots of bystanders running or people reacting to Godzilla feel more real here than they do in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla, it’s because we have ample primary evidence of the way people react in a natural disaster.

Shin Godzilla rules.