There is a moment in the latest Godzilla film when the creature glares directly into the camera, its snorting, radioactive rage every bit as infinite and incomprehensible as it was in the 1954 original.
But look carefully behind those mad, luminescent eyes, and there is something even more boundless: fatigue. Specifically, the tiredness of extreme overwork. Because, over the course of nearly 70 years and 37 films, Godzilla has in many ways been Japan’s most put-upon worker — a scaly Stakhanov toiling year after year in the mines of metaphor.
Whenever postwar Japan has required a diverting, sometimes quite silly allegory to help make sense of seven decades of breathtaking domestic and global change, it has leaned with confidence on Godzilla. It has done so knowing that everything from nuclear threat, environmental catastrophe and pandemic to geopolitical rifts, political hubris and human stupidity can be projected on to the teeth, claws and dorsal spines of this one, city-smashing monster.