I definitely have always liked that aspect of the first Godzilla. He's a mythological beast and a metaphor for man's aggression all rolled into one. The ending of the movie, even discounting Serizawa's death, is so melancholy and hardly cathartic and upbeat like when the monster is put down in most American films. Godzilla is destroyed, but it isn't pretty and it comes at a terrible price.

I think the Heisei Godzilla, in the first three films at least, also pretty effectively plays up the whole "Godzilla as victim itself" aspect. The design in Return of Godzilla looks the most radiation charred. Godzilla's entombment in Mount Mihara is similarly handled to his death in the original.

Kaneko takes the whole "Godzilla as war" aspect one step further by having the creature be filled with the souls of Japan's victims of the Pacific War and if one has any idea how much bitter hatred the other Asians, espeically the Chinese, feel toward Japan for the war, it was a smart and daring move and update on Kaneko's part. The movie is really about Japan's difficulty in facing its past and how that has come back to haunt them in times of greater prosperity.