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" Earlier this week, NASA held a news conference more terrifying than any horror movie, about the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. The evidence they gathered demonstrates, beyond any meaningful doubt, that rising sea levels are now &amp;quot;unstoppable.&amp;quot; The shift has come: The scientists aren&amp;#039;t lecturing us anymore about what we should do to stop the end of the world as we know it; they&amp;#039;re telling us to prepare for the results of what we have already done. The sea level could rise 10 feet or more. Richard Alley addressed the monumentality of the change in The New York Times: Continued release of greenhouse gases will almost certainly make the situation worse. The heat-trapping gases could destabilize other parts of Antarctica as well as the Greenland ice sheet, potentially causing enough sea-level rise that many of the world&amp;#039;s coastal cities would eventually have to be abandoned. That&amp;#039;s in a newspaper, not in a trashy novel. New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London, Rome, Sydney, Jakarta: They&amp;#039;re about to get stomped on. The Anthropocene, a term for an era during which human activities have had a significant global impact on earth&amp;#039;s ecosystems, has arrived, and we are only now starting to feel the consequences. Basically, in real life, we have reached the part of Godzilla when the scientists know a monster is about to rise from the sea but it hasn&amp;#039;t destroyed Tokyo yet. The original film has its sixtieth anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, a new version of Godzilla, starring Bryan Cranston, opens this weekend. But there&amp;#039;s always been a version of Godzilla around since it started. The original Japanese series had twenty-seven sequels. There have been over a dozen video games. Godzilla is one of the very few pop culture reference points that remains permanently current. Even King Kong goes in and out of mass consciousness. The Japanese monster has transcended mere pop culture, turning into contemporary myth. Like all myths, it reappears to feed off our deepest fears and to comfort us in our deepest needs.  The beauty of the Godzilla story is how it combines the most ancient with the most contemporary of terrors. Godzilla himself is a sort of dinosaur, but roused from his habitat by nuclear testing. Atomic paranoia was the original source of the movie&amp;#039;s power. The monster&amp;#039;s first onscreen appearance, to a group of fisherman, was as a Nagasaki bombing-like blinding flash of light. His footprints were radioactive. The fear of nuclear destruction and radiation were dramatic enough, of course, and natural obsessions for the 1950s. But from the vantage point of current history, they were harbingers of an even more profound anxiety. The atomic bomb was the beginning of the Anthropocene era, the first glimmer of the anxiety that human beings, through the unintended consequences of progress, could destroy themselves and the planet.  The entire history of what we consider a monster had to be reimagined as a result of that change. If you take very old stories of monsters, like the Anglo-Saxon story of Beowulf, the pattern is much the same. The beast arises from the murk. Human beings go to war against it. The humans win. The struggle is reassuring, stating and restating humanity&amp;#039;s triumph over the forces of nature.  The Anthropocene monster is a much more complex business. The war against Godzilla is a war against the wild, unpredictable consequences of our own magnificent intelligence. Which is why the original Godzilla is such a foundational story. When the citizens of Tokyo learn about the existence of Godzilla, they go about their ordinary business as if the monsters were the old kind. Journalists give warnings. Politicians organize resistance. Generals send warriors. The religious pray. But it is all insufficient. The only device that will work is a weapon of mass destruction, an &amp;quot;Oxygen Destroyer.&amp;quot; The scientist who invents this super-weapon is terrified about how people will use it after Godzilla: &amp;quot;Bombs versus bombs, missiles versus missiles, and now a new super-weapon to throw upon us all! As a scientist \u2014 no, as a human being \u2014 I can&amp;#039;t allow that to happen!&amp;quot; In the end, convinced by seeing the nuclear fallout after Godzilla&amp;#039;s rampage, he uses the device but makes sure to kill himself in the process. Godzilla and the technology all go down in one horrible mess. It&amp;#039;s the only fitting end to the monster produced, accidentally, by human intelligence. Godzilla is one of the most parodied films of all time. Everybody makes fun of the kitschy special effects, the screaming Japanese crowds, the simplicity of the basic plot \u2014 Monster breaks city! Army breaks monster! \u2014 but the laughter is a cover for how powerful a story it really is. Nobody makes twenty-seven sequels of something because it&amp;#039;s fun to watch ironically. Godzilla returns because we need it, and we need it more than ever today.  An anxiety haunts our dreams and we have no solution: What are we supposed to do with the fact that our own power and cleverness are destroying us? As the NASA report makes painfully clear, that fearful question is no longer just in our dreams, or in monster movies, either. It has become all too real. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/a28705/godzilla-monster-2014/>