My husband sent a message to our family group chat, “I want to see this,” and attached the trailer to the new Godzilla Minus One. Our daughter, like me, was like, I don’t care about this, but I’ll definitely go with everyone to see it. Our son said, yes, absolutely, he’d heard it’s fantastic, when can we go.

Like most of us, I think of Godzilla as a campy monster movie. I care as much about campy monster movies as much as I do about superhero movies, which is not at all. When our son talked about Godzilla, though, he said it’s an allegory for the atomic bomb. I thought, huh, I didn’t know that. That makes it much more interesting.

We ate an early dinner then piled into the car together and drove in the rain to the movie theater. I settled in for some goofy entertainment, and was surprised to find myself captivated by the characters, the music, and the seriousness of the film. It’s a movie about a giant radioactive dinosaur monster that lives in the ocean, and it was not goofy. It showed how horrific it is to be the target of nuclear weapons, how utterly devastating they are, how big, how unstoppable. How monstrous.

I was riveted through the entire movie, and I was moved. It was really, really good.