Godzilla has been part of the pop-cultural landscape for more than three generations, so it’s hard to imagine a time when the monster wasn’t the source of jokes, memes, rock-and-roll riffs, and the ubiquitous prefix “son of” and suffix “-zilla.” Yet it has been a long time since Japan last released a Godzilla film. The dry spell ends with “Godzilla Resurgence,” which recently débuted a new trailer. Due out this July, it will be the first Godzilla movie made in its homeland in twelve years. It is being directed in tandem by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi, two otaku fan-favorites who are widely considered a dream team. Anno’s groundbreaking 1995 animated series “Evangelion” was deeply influenced by Japanese live-action sci-fi TV and cinema, and Higuchi rose to fame with his special-effects work on the mid-nineties “Gamera” trilogy, an improbably dark reboot of a sixties children’s series starring a giant fire-breathing turtle.

The film’s Japanese title of Shin Gojira is deliberately spelled with characters that invite interpretations of either a “New” or “True” Godzilla. “It’s been in the works a long time,” the executive producer of the film, Akihiro Yamauchi, told me. “It’s not like it was produced just because of the Hollywood ‘Godzilla,’ ” he said, referring to the director Gareth Edwards’s well-received take, from 2014. As in that film, the scenes of destruction are now portrayed with computer graphics instead of the classic man-in-a-suit. Yamauchi wouldn’t confirm the budget, other than to call it “the largest-scale Japanese movie ever made.” With a cast of three hundred and twenty-eight actors, plus countless fleeing extras for the crowd scenes, it almost seems as if the entirety of Japan’s entertainment industry has been marshalled to make the film. Yet, watching the trailer, it’s obvious that something fundamental about Godzilla has changed.

After more than sixty years of sequels, many of which devolved into repetitive giant-monster pro-wrestling matches, Godzilla’s origin as a pointed political critique has been forgotten. The very first “Gojira,” released in Japan in the winter of 1954, arrived soon after what is known as the Lucky Dragon No. 5 Incident, named for an unfortunate fishing vessel that was irradiated by an American hydrogen bomb test gone awry. Coming less than a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the images in the media of the vessel’s twenty three radiation-scarred crewmen sparked a massive outcry in Japan. “Gojira” was already well into production when the incident occurred, but the events left an indelible mark on the finished product. The titular monster was now “a modern horror born from the hydrogen bomb.” Critics derided the movie as grotesque sensationalism. The public felt otherwise. It went on to sell close to ten million tickets.

The anti-nuclear-testing angle, unsurprisingly, was all but excised from the American release two years later, resulting in a wholly new plot summed up by the late Roger Ebert as “stupendous idiocy.” (The bargain-basement voice-acting and the intercut scenes featuring a disinterested Raymond Burr didn’t help.) Even hobbled in this way, or perhaps because of it, “Godzilla, King of the Monsters!” was a hit among American audiences hungry for atomic scare fare. Japan had found an unlikely international superstar in Godzilla. In the ensuing years, there were twenty-eight domestic and two American follow-ups, ranging in quality from the inspired to the insipid, often in the very same film. Today, Godzilla ranks as one of the most sequelled film franchises in movie history, edging out James Bond. But the giant monster’s existence as a personification and criticism of America’s nuclear strategy remains lost on many U.S. moviegoers and creators. Roland Emmerich’s much-reviled 1998 “Godzilla” recasts the subject as a “Jurassic Park”-styled dinosaur hunt set amid the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Even Gareth Edwards’s 2014 film, which was obviously crafted with a great deal of care and love for the franchise, mixes metaphors by dropping an actual nuclear bomb on the creature.

In the endless cycle of spectacular one-upmanship that has overtaken the superhero-saturated American cinema, the wholesale destruction of entire cities almost feels routine, just another tool in a Hollywood writer’s kit. And the impact that these battles royal would have on average citizens is only rarely explored. But the imagery of fallen buildings and rubble is all too familiar to audiences in Japan, where a history of large-scale disasters is part of the fabric of daily life. As I was conducting interviews about Godzilla in Tokyo, the airwaves were filled with images of crumpled buildings, distorted roadways, and blanket-wrapped refugees who had been left homeless by a series of powerful earthquakes centered near the city of Kumamoto. They struck without warning on a spring evening, killing at least forty-nine people and displacing tens of thousands from their homes.

The 1954 “Gojira” resonated so deeply with its audience because of the painfully fresh memories of entire Tokyo city blocks levelled by Allied firebombings less than a decade before. In the preview for “Godzilla Resurgence,” you can see how the directors are again mining the collective memories of Japanese viewers for dramatic effect. But their touchstones are no longer incendiary and nuclear bombs. Instead they are the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, which killed close to twenty thousand people and introduced Japan to a new form of nuclear horror caused by out-of-control civilian reactors. Indeed, the now fiery-complexioned Godzilla seems to be a walking nuclear power plant on the brink of melting down. For anyone who lived in Japan through the trying days of late March of 2011, the sight of blue-jumpsuited government spokesmen convening emergency press conferences is enough to send a chill down one’s spine. So is the shot in the trailer of a stunned man quietly regarding mountains of debris, something that could have been lifted straight out of television footage of the hardest-hit regions up north. Even the sight of the radioactive monster’s massive tail swishing over residential streets evokes memories of the fallout sent wafting over towns and cites in the course of Fukushima Daiichi’s meltdown.

It’s an open question as to how foreign audiences will perceive the subtext of these scenes, or if they even really need to. Equally so for the shots of the Japanese military’s tanks, aircraft, cruisers, and howitzers engaging the giant monster, which at first glance might simply appear a homage to a classic movie trope. But “Godzilla Resurgence” appears at a time in Japanese history much changed from that of even its most recent predecessor. In the last twelve years, the Self-Defense Forces have gone from little more than an afterthought to folk heroes for their role in 2011 tsunami rescue efforts, and now to the center of a controversy as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pushes through legislation to expand their role abroad. Traditionally, Japanese monster movies have used images of military hardware hurled indiscriminately against a much larger foe as a potent symbol of the nation’s own disastrous wartime experience. But the regional political situation for Japan is far more complicated now. The fight scenes hint at changing attitudes toward the military in Japan. The movie was produced with “total coöperation” of the Self-Defense Forces, according to Yamauchi. This access enhances the realism for the filmmakers, while Godzilla’s status as a powerful force of nature allows troops to be scrambled without seeming to promote Japanese militarization.

It’s far too early to say how “Godzilla Resurgence” will reflect, let alone shape, Japanese moviegoers’ feelings about their government and military. But there is at least one intriguing parallel between the Godzilla films and Japan’s real-life disaster response. In the 1954 “Gojira,” the government constructs a massive electrified fence around the city in a fruitless attempt to keep the creature out. This year, the Japanese government is débuting a long-delayed, controversial “ice wall” around the stricken Fukushima plants to keep contaminated groundwater in. Whether this ice wall will be any more effective in stopping radioactive leaks than the electric fence was in stopping radioactive monsters remains to be seen. What’s certain is that Godzilla retains its knack for returning when its country most needs it, providing a giant canvas upon which Japan can work through its existential angst.