I suddenly feel the need to write an essay on why the most enduring characters of 20th century culture are going to end up being a futuristic starship captain, a billionaire who dresses as a bat, an immortal alien who travels through time in a box, and a giant atomic lizard. And while this is not the time or the place for such consideration, we find ourselves on the cusp of no less than 70 years since the first time Godzilla emerged from the pacific and began terrorizing Tokyo. Godzilla Minus One, the first Japanese take on the monster since Shin Godzilla in 2014, takes the franchise back to its starting point and relaunches the character with great success and appropriate horror.
You will be forgiven if expectations for this film in your mind were low, especially if front of mind are the increasingly unhinged and vapid Legendary Pictures monster brawl films, including the recently trailered and ridiculous looking Godzilla x Kong. Those films are American through and through, turning Godzilla into little more than an cartoon action hero while actors not too good to turn down the pay cheque talk while staring out windows and vaguely up. The destruction is massive, but empty. Like so many disaster films, cities get leveled with no consideration for the hundreds, thousands, or millions killed in their wake. This is increasingly a problem of 21st century cinema, where the scale is achievable but the human cost is meaningless, and thus there is no emotional substance to the destruction. Its just toy blocks being knocked over.
The Japanese have the unenviable distinction of being the only country in the world with the memory of what it means to see their cities evaporated in the blast of a nuclear bomb. Nearly a century later, its clear that those memories continue to run deep in the younger generations - forget not what the follies of the past have wrought, else they come again. The Japanese provoked a sleeping monster in the pacific, and that monster laid waste to their country. Gee, that sounds like a good idea for a film.
Godzilla Minus One (G-1 from here) begins in 1945, as the war wanes, as Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lands his plane at a small mechanical outpost. A kamikaze pilot who turned and ran, he is immediately greeted with shame and guilt over having not done his honourable duty. That night, he becomes one of only two survivors of Godzilla, who appears like the manifestation of his guilt to butcher the mechanics giving him aid. Again, he has the opportunity to die with honour, and makes a decision to live. The trauma of these decisions, decisions made out of fear and self preservation, haunt and motivate Kōichi for the rest of the film. This is very much a movie about PTSD, survivors guilt, and shame. Godzilla then, in his ever metaphorical grandeur, is the remembrance of that shame, the mental block that must be overcome in order to move beyond and actually live. If Godzilla is not confronted and bested, he will destroy everything still precious and worth saving in your life.
The film follows Kōichi as he returns to the fire bombed remains of his Tokyo home to find his family and neighbours dead, and himself ostracized for having survived the war. If he had died after all, the war might have been won. Slowly, as the community around him rebuilds, so does his life. He takes in Noriko (Minami Hamabe), whose parents also died in the bombings, and an orphaned baby, the irrepressibly adorable Akiko (Sae Nagatani); he gets a job de-mining the waters off shore with an assorted crew who become his friends; he builds a home. And yet every night he is plagued with the memories of his failures, and how he feels unworthy to actually live the life he’s built for himself, as it is a life undeserved. And then, in 1947, Godzilla returns.
The thing this movie does that hasn’t been successful since the 1954 original is make Godzilla scary. And he is. This is no lonely god, no merciful guardian of the Japanese people. G-1 gives us a callous, apathetic force of nature, an unstoppable wave of destruction, the sins of war given flesh and made vengeful. This Godzilla strides through the city scape crushing the fleeing masses beneath him and doesn’t notice. His attention is diverted only when the heavy artillery is brought out, and then he becomes death, the destroyer of worlds. I congratulate the film on giving us a few glimpses of Godzilla’s mindset, through close ups of his eyes and hands which suggest both an internal sorrow and intentful hate directed towards those attacking him. However, the film deftly avoids personifying the monster. He is elemental, beyond human emotion. He arrives, he carves a swarth of destruction in his path, and nukes what he cannot best with strength.
G-1 would make for a wonderful double feature with this summer’s Oppenheimer. As that film contended with the philosophical considerations of what a nuclear weapon set loose in the world might mean, G-1 shows us, in what is easily the most emotionally affecting scene I’ve every seen in a monster movie. The shock wave, the heat, the transition between a living place and a field of death, and the sun blocked by the rising mushroom cloud. Writer, director, and visual effects supervisor Takashi Yamazaki had such clear vision for the story he wanted to tell, and executes it above the standard. His story is one of a country and its people reckoning with their past, and the choices they made. Story-wise, in two years, you see the Japanese people following the lead of their government, to standing up for themselves. Going from a military might to being just people trying to survive. That honour comes not from following blindly, but from being true and honest with ones self. I’ve heard the film described as Ocean’s 11 meets Jaws, and those are both fine influences. I see a lot of Dunkirk in it too, but mostly I see the absence of other Godzilla movies. I see what it is trying not to be, and in not being those things, being the best of those things.
It is a challenging thing to say that any version of anything is the definitive one, but I feel like this Godzilla will have a lasting impact at least on Toho’s works in the immediacy. Gone is the camp that infiltrated and defined the character for decades. There are no alien robots, no giant moths, no goofy side kicks. There is human trauma, grief, and the monster. There is also comedy, don’t get me wrong, this is a very funny movie at times - Captain Yōji (Kuranosuke Sasaki) provides most of these laughs, while never feeling like a joke character. Taking a post-war drama and draping it over a monster movie results in unparalleled success at almost every turn (only the film’s literal last minutes don’t work for me, but perhaps they will for you). The special effects are the best I’ve seen in five years, certainly better than the rubber looking likes of Dial of Destiny, and the unfinished effects we’ve seen in every Marvel movie and TV show this year. The real champion though is the sound editing and score. Both grip the soft tissue of your lungs and squeeze. The last act of the film is incredibly tense, edge of the seat action, propelled there by the daunting thrums of the score and piercing squelch of Godzilla’s cry.
Much as been made in the press of the unexpected success of G-1 in the North American box office, how inexpensive it was to make compared to films of this scale in the American system, and how it will be raised to the rafters as another of 2023’s unexpected saviors of the movie industry. The simple fact is, this movie is good. It was made well, and passionately, and is easily the best action movie I’ve seen this year, though I would not personally qualify it as such (but when you have a 50 meters tall nuclear dinosaur as the second lead, what else could you call it). Why is it connecting with audiences when other bigger brands are falling like leaves? Because it’s good. And that’s what audiences want.
Godzilla Minus One is in theatres now.
Give This A Watch
The Host (2006)
The movie that brought Bong Joon-ho to the attention of the rest of the world, and the other monster movie that came to mind as I was watching G-1. The Host is a similarly human-driven, trauma-focused monster movie, where the struggle is as much about what is happening within the main character as it is the CGI beastie that they are hunting.
I love monster movies, and my tastes have definitely evolved over time. But when I think about my favourite ones, the ones I revisit and think of as the pinnacles of the genres, it is never the ones where monsters are whacking on each other and knocking over buildings that I return to. The best ones are the ones that have something to say about the humans being threatened. When you put the monster first, all you have is spectacle.