I’ve put off watching this for years — 28 of them! — because I knew how it would impact me.

This is it. This is the end of Godzilla, as there’s no escape from death for any of us. The only question is whether it will come at the ends of the new and unstoppable kaiju Destroyah, which has come from the Oxygen Destroyer that has stopped Godzilla before, or from the fact that inside the creature’s heart, Godzilla has a nuclear reactor that is melting down.

The twenty-second film in the series and the seventh and final in the Heisei era, this is also the last movie for actress Momoko Kōchi, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka and composer Akira Ifukube.

So much of this is a callback to the first movie, starting with hearing the roar before the title.

Miki Saegusa (Megumi Odaka, who is in six of the Heisei era films) of the United Nations Godzilla Countermeasures Center (UNGCC) has been tracking Godzilla and Little Godzilla since SpaceGodzilla was destroyed. She finds out that a volcanically triggered uranium deposit has caused Godzilla to go into meltdown and when his temperature reaches 1,200 °C, he will explode and melt the Earth with him.

The UNGCC finds a college student named Kenkichi Yamane (Yasufumi Hayashi), the grandson of Dr. Kyohei Yamane, the inventor of the Oxygen Destroyer. They use the Super X III to cool Godzilla for as long as they can. At the same time, crustaceans mutated by the Oxygen Destroyer rise and start to kill people before joining into one kaiju form known as Destroyah.

Miki uses Little Godzilla to fight the monster in the hopes that Godzilla will save him and die a valiant death in battle before blowing up. Instead, the child-like Godzilla is killed by Destroyah’s Micro-Oxygen beam as the kaiju final boss enters its perfect form.

As the scientists try to stop Godzilla, it mutates into a meltdown form, looking as if its covered with lava. It tears Destroyah apart, who is stopped by the UNGCC from flying away. Then, the various weapons fire on Godzilla, who slowly melts away, leaving Tokyo irradiated for the rest of time. Or so we would believe, until it suddenly goes away and the smaller Godzilla is reborn as the new King of the Monsters, signifying a new era.

Ifukube, when composing this, said he wrote the final song “as if he were writing the theme to his own death.”

This would have been it for Godzilla, but Hollywood started making new movies and that’s how we got to where we are. Did this movie make me cry? Oh man, you know it. You can make fun of these dumb movies with their rubber suits, but if you grew up with Godzilla and had such a worship of him in your young years, seeing him as someone who could defend you when things were dark, then even in your old age, the close of this film is beyond emotional. You are watching a best friend die.