All monster movies can be read as metaphors, whether they’re intended to be or not: It’s not much of a stretch to intuit that the fearsome creatures we meet in the movies— whether they’ve been catapulted from outer space or brought to life by our own hubris—represent the unnamed fears we struggle with every day. Even so, there’s something particularly poignant about Godzilla, the raging reptilian behemoth who made his first appearance in the 1954 Japanese sci-fi classic of the same name. The United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima only nine years before; Godzilla , stomping listlessly through the streets of Tokyo, was both a symbol of nuclear destruction and an expression of the kind of rage that can’t easily be put into words. He didn’t ask to be born, yet here he was, clumsy, solitary, misunderstood.…