At a time when Japan faces exis­ten­tial threats from Chi­na and North Korea, and when some of its lead­ers ques­tion America’s com­mit­ment to defend its long­time ally or sug­gest it’s time all Amer­i­can bases and troops leave the coun­try , the 29 th Godzil­la fea­ture from Toho Stu­dios imag­ines a world in which Japan gets out from under Washington’s thumb. With a paean to the country’s Self Defense Forces and espous­ing themes of nation­al and cul­tur­al pride, the film shows Japan flex­ing a bit of its own mil­i­tary mus­cle and break­ing rank with the U.S. to save itself from destruc­tion through a home­grown com­bo of polit­i­cal, diplo­mat­ic and sci­en­tif­ic means.

Mid­way through Shin Godzil­la, Amer­i­can B2 stealth bombers drop their pay­load on the mon­ster as it tram­ples through Tokyo. The crea­ture launch­es a mas­sive coun­ter­at­tack, tan­ta­mount to a nuclear explo­sion, and through the CGI fire and smoke the impli­ca­tion becomes clear: Japan can no longer rely on the Unit­ed States to keep it safe.

Shin Godzil­la (“New Godzil­la”), which has a lim­it­ed U.S. the­atri­cal engage­ment from Octo­ber 11 to 18, is being mar­ket­ed here as a typ­i­cal city-smash­ing affair. But if Godzil­la movies are the def­i­n­i­tion of for­mu­la­ic, this one is cer­tain­ly uncon­ven­tion­al. It’s not tru­ly a mon­ster or dis­as­ter movie at all, but a faux-doc­u­men­tary look at politi­cians and bureau­crats respond­ing to a dooms­day sce­nario, with all of the dead­locked meet­ings, end­less dis­cus­sions, con­fer­ence calls and star­ing at com­put­er screens. If it sounds imper­son­al, it is — nobody in the film is out­side the gov­ern­men­tal bub­ble, and nobody has much of an indi­vid­ual sto­ry. What the film eschews in per­son­al emo­tion, how­ev­er, it replaces with a sense of nation­al pride, embod­ied not by the bum­bling, inde­ci­sive, pass-the-buck, old-school politi­cians (in a fine moment of satire, the aging prime min­is­ter is more con­cerned about a bowl of sog­gy noo­dles than the sit­u­a­tion at hand) but by the younger, patri­ot­ic and clear-head­ed gen­er­a­tion that leads the coun­try out of the mess.

With­in this core of ​“soft nation­al­ism” lies a tac­it endorse­ment of the poli­cies of Japan’s cur­rent con­ser­v­a­tive leader, Prime Min­is­ter Shin­zo Abe, who has made it known he wants to revise Japan’s U.S.-drafted con­sti­tu­tion, which Gen­er­al Dou­glas MacArthur forced upon the coun­try in 1947. Japan’s armed forces were dis­band­ed after World War II; under con­sti­tu­tion­al guide­lines, the Self Defense Forces were estab­lished in 1954 but lim­it­ed to defend­ing the coun­try against inter­nal threats and respond­ing to nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, and pro­hib­it­ed from offen­sive oper­a­tions on behalf of Japan or its allies. Japan’s nation­al defense is pro­scribed by the 1951 U.S.-Japan Mutu­al Secu­ri­ty Treaty, under which Wash­ing­ton still main­tains 54,000 troops there, though the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary pres­ence is a long­stand­ing source of ten­sion between the two nations. Abe believes Japan would be bet­ter served with a tra­di­tion­al, autonomous military.

Rumored to have cost only $10 mil­lion, Shin Godzil­la has been a major hit in Japan, well sur­pass­ing the $160-mil­lion Hol­ly­wood remake of 2014. Japan­ese fans report­ed­ly enjoyed the film’s patri­ot­ic spir­it, rat-tat-tat dia­logue and depic­tions of bureau­crat­ic bungling. Abe him­self has cred­it­ed its suc­cess to its con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics: ​“I think that [Godzilla’s] pop­u­lar­i­ty is root­ed in the unwa­ver­ing sup­port that the pub­lic has for the Self-Defense Forces,” he recent­ly said, accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post.

It’s been 12 years since a new Japan­ese-made Godzil­la movie, and it was dur­ing that time that Abe rose to become arguably the nation’s most con­se­quen­tial, if oft-con­tro­ver­sial, prime min­is­ter since World War II. Abe has pushed to strength­en the Self-Defense Forces’ air and naval capa­bil­i­ties, and won pas­sage of a plan per­mit­ting the SDF to engage in over­seas com­bat for the first time since World War II. This dra­mat­ic shift in mil­i­tary pos­ture is sup­port­ed by Wash­ing­ton because it enables Japan to send troops or ves­sels to help Amer­i­cans in com­bat oper­a­tions, but it drew big crowds of anti­war pro­test­ers in Tokyo.

Shin Godzil­la, how­ev­er, med­i­tates upon Abe’s most con­tro­ver­sial idea: to revise the constitution’s Arti­cle 9, which declares that ​“the Japan­ese peo­ple for­ev­er renounce war as a sov­er­eign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of set­tling inter­na­tion­al dis­putes.” Giv­en China’s ongo­ing mil­i­tary buildup in the South Chi­na Sea and oth­er threats, Abe has said the restric­tions on Japan’s mil­i­tary ​“do not fit into the cur­rent peri­od.” Detrac­tors wor­ry Japan could even­tu­al­ly trans­form from a peace­ful U.S. wing­man into a major remil­i­ta­rized world pow­er. This fric­tion between a paci­fist stance and the need for mil­i­tary self-deter­mi­na­tion has per­sist­ed ever since Tokyo and Wash­ing­ton first forged post­war ties. Abe’s grand­fa­ther Nobusuke Kishi, who was prime min­is­ter in the late 1950s, sim­i­lar­ly want­ed to abol­ish Arti­cle 9 , but could not muster pop­u­lar sup­port. Instead, Kishi got the Eisen­how­er Admin­is­tra­tion to revise the Mutu­al Secu­ri­ty Treaty and strength­en Washington’s pledge to defend Japan. Oppo­nents feared the arrange­ment would pull Japan into a U.S. war with the Sovi­ets, and after mas­sive demon­stra­tions, Kishi resigned.

Today, Japan­ese domes­tic pol­i­tics is back-page stuff in main­stream U.S. news­pa­pers; thus some Amer­i­can view­ers more accus­tomed to watch­ing Godzil­la fight Moth­ra or Mechagodzil­la may be per­plexed as this film instead painstak­ing­ly shows bureau­crats and cab­i­net min­is­ters strug­gling to find con­sti­tu­tion­al jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the use of mil­i­tary force (some­thing nobody ever wor­ried about in the old Godzil­la movies). Gen­er­als and sol­diers assume an easy vic­to­ry against the out­sized crea­ture advanc­ing on Tokyo, but the nom­i­nal hero, young Deputy Chief Cab­i­net Sec­re­tary Ran­do Yaguchi (Hiro­ki Hasegawa), knows the errors of the past: ​“Wish­ful think­ing and arm­chair the­o­ries by the old Impe­r­i­al Army in the last war led to 3 mil­lion Japan­ese lives lost. Beware of unfound­ed opti­mism.” This being a Godzil­la film, Yaguchi is of course proven right, and the mon­ster with­stands assaults by both Japan­ese and U.S. forces — though it’s the latter’s mas­sive fire­pow­er that trig­gers Godzilla’s retal­i­a­tion and ensu­ing carnage.

Shin Godzil­la por­trays the U.S. in a less than flat­ter­ing light, as an over­bear­ing giant will­ing — as some real-life Japan­ese lead­ers have wor­ried — to sac­ri­fice Japan to pro­tect its own inter­ests. After expend­ing its ener­gy against the stealth bombers, Godzil­la goes into hiber­na­tion. Fear­ing the crea­ture will awak­en and even­tu­al­ly reach U.S. shores, Wash­ing­ton and a coali­tion of Unit­ed Nations syco­phants force the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment to evac­u­ate Tokyo for a nuclear strike on the sleep­ing mon­ster. One young offi­cial con­cedes that his hap­less coun­try is mere­ly America’s ​“trib­u­tary state.”

Amer­i­ca is per­son­i­fied, none too sub­tly, in Kayoko Ann Pat­ter­son (Sato­mi Ishi­hara), a 20-some­thing Japan­ese-Amer­i­can pres­i­den­tial envoy. She’s pushy, flir­ty, has no time for Japan­ese ​“hon­orifics” and shops at Zara dur­ing a nation­al emer­gency. Ulti­mate­ly, her Japan­ese roots trump all, how­ev­er, and Pat­ter­son assists the Japan­ese gov­ern­ment in under­cut­ting Washington’s con­clu­sion that ​“our nuclear wis­dom is the only road to sal­va­tion for mankind,” as one sci­en­tist awk­ward­ly puts it. The third act is a stan­dard race against the clock to deliv­er a freez­ing coag­u­lant into Godzilla’s blood­stream and neu­tral­ize the kai­ju before the mis­sile is launched.

Things have changed since Ishi­ro Honda’s Godzil­la (1954), made just two years after the occu­pa­tion end­ed, and at a time when Japan depend­ed whol­ly on the U.S. for its eco­nom­ic and mil­i­tary secu­ri­ty. Honda’s film sound­ed an alarm against nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion and graph­i­cal­ly revis­it­ed the hor­rors of Hiroshi­ma, Nagasa­ki and the Tokyo fire raids. The mon­ster was both a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the bomb and an attempt to reck­on with the country’s war mak­ing. Hon­da skew­ered the cow­ardice of Japan­ese politi­cians unwill­ing to con­front Wash­ing­ton over the H‑bomb test that awak­ened Godzil­la (reflect­ing the polit­i­cal response to the Lucky Drag­on nuclear acci­dent that same year) and more con­cerned about pre­serv­ing trade routes than pub­lic safe­ty. Shin Godzil­la is far more overt­ly polit­i­cal, and in its implic­it affir­ma­tion of the Abe administration’s world­view and its alter-real­i­ty where­in Japan’s young ide­al­ists sub­vert Washington’s dead­ly direc­tive, it has lit­tle use for the orig­i­nal film’s unfet­tered pacifism.

That said, Godzilla’s metaphor has always changed with the times. It helped sat­i­rize the banal­i­ty of ear­ly Japan­ese tele­vi­sion in King Kong vs. Godzil­la (1962); it fought Japan’s run­away pol­lu­tion prob­lem in Godzil­la vs. Hedo­rah (1971); it was a focal point of Rea­gan-era Cold War ten­sions in Godzil­la (1984); and it was even more plain­ly nation­al­is­tic in Godzil­la vs. King Ghi­do­rah (1991), defend­ing Japan against Cau­casian time-trav­el­ers bent on crash­ing the country’s bub­ble economy.

Ignor­ing the 1954 orig­i­nal and all its idio­syn­crat­ic sequels, the 2016 film con­ceives of Godzil­la not as a long-dor­mant dinosaur but a high­ly evolved muta­tion of sea organ­isms exposed to ille­gal­ly dumped radioac­tive waste, and capa­ble of rapid prop­a­ga­tion that will wipe out mankind. The lat­est ver­sion of the mon­ster — glow­ing red-hot, leav­ing a swath of radi­a­tion in its wake, cre­at­ing a wave of float­ing cars, boats, and struc­tures as it reach­es land, and requir­ing mass evac­u­a­tions — is unmis­tak­ably sym­bol­ic of the 2011 tsuna­mi and Fukushi­ma Dai­ichi nuclear dis­as­ter that killed 16,000 and left 160,000 homeless.

The final effort to neu­tral­ize Godzil­la, with haz­mat-suit­ed work­ers enter­ing the irra­di­at­ed zone on what’s cer­tain­ly a sui­cide mis­sion (“Japan’s future we place in your hands,” the hero Yaguchi says in a rous­ing, patri­ot­ic speech) is suc­cess­ful. The frozen mon­ster remains stand­ing in the mid­dle of Tokyo, a dis­as­ter mon­u­ment not unlike the decay­ing remains of the Fukushi­ma reac­tor, a big mass of bro­ken con­crete and twist­ed met­al that will remain indefinitely.

But ulti­mate­ly the Fukushi­ma alle­go­ry is sec­ondary; the film quick­ly piv­ots back to more soft nation­alisms, the expres­sion of Japan­ese cul­tur­al pride encour­aged by the gov­ern­ment and asso­ci­at­ed with young cit­i­zens. Recall­ing the after­math of World War II, Shin Godzil­la ends with a dec­i­mat­ed Japan and its youngish lead­ers pledg­ing, with inter­na­tion­al assis­tance, to meet the chal­lenge of rebuild­ing it. Yaguchi bids good­bye to the Japan­ese-Amer­i­can hero­ine, scoff­ing at the idea that his coun­try will for­ev­er remain Washington’s puppet.

Gen­er­a­tions of Japan­ese have now grown up with no direct mem­o­ry of World War II, but they have still inher­it­ed the country’s war lega­cy and its long his­to­ry of being rav­aged by nat­ur­al dis­as­ters. In that sense, the theme of endur­ing and rebuild­ing that runs through Shin Godzil­la is true to the monster’s orig­i­nal mes­sage, even if the film’s right-lean­ing pol­i­tics are not.

“It was imprint­ed on my psy­che that Tokyo could be anni­hi­lat­ed any minute,” direc­tor Hidea­ki Anno, best known as cre­ator of the inter­na­tion­al­ly pop­u­lar, apoc­a­lyp­tic Evan­ge­lion ani­mé fran­chise, told the Japan Times in 2014. ​“I nev­er expe­ri­enced the hor­rors of war that my parent’s gen­er­a­tion did, but the imagery is very famil­iar to me, as is the Cold War-era fear of nuclear war. The feel­ing that it could hap­pen is still with me.”

