Godzilla Minus One

In Takashi Yamazaki’s new spin on a classic, War is hell, but giant rampaging monsters are even worse.

“Live.”

We often live with many regrets in life: not doing your duty, not asking that girl to marry you, not shooting an unprotected Godzillasaurus in the face when you had the chance. Of course, some regrets are more universal than others but those are some of the regrets faced by the hero of the latest film in Toho’s increasingly continuity-free Godzilla series, Godzilla Minus One.

Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot at the end of WW2 who has chickened out of his assignment, lied about the state of his aircraft, and has landed on Oda island to have it looked at by a team of mechanics. It’s then that a small (comparatively, anyway) Godzilla – seemingly in his original dinosaur form – lands on the scene and starts wrecking shop. Shikishima chickens out of shooting it with his plane’s weapons, and the monster kills almost everyone on the island.

When he returns to land, he’s filled with guilt, and tries to alleviate it by taking in a young woman named Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned baby she’s rescued. He takes a job cleaning up mines, with naval weapons engineer Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), captain Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki) and greenhorn Mizushima (yuki Yamada). Doing this job, he once again witnesses Godzilla, now ten times it original size thanks to nuclear testing, who is hell bent on destruction.

What follows is your fairly typical Godzilla film, with failed attempts to kill it, and the inescapable rampage through Tokyo. Visually, it’s up there as one of the bestlooking Godzilla films, with a great sense of scale that does a solid job of emphasising how devastating his destructive presence is.

But as great as all that violence is, a Godzilla film is nothing without societal context and a hint of allegory. Throughout the years, it’s been tricky to keep the stories relevant with more than a couple botched attempts (see Godzilla vs Hedorah), and many films straight up abandoning any extra depth for just monsters battling. Shin Godzilla managed to get a lot out of the uninspiring government response to the Fukushima disaster, with many of the main characters running around clueless like they were written by Armando Iannucci.

Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki takes this lack of sufficient government responsibility a touch more seriously and chooses to tell the story of everyday folks – many of them  World War 2 veterans – coming together to take on an enemy together. This is coupled with the natural feelings of trauma, guilt and regret that characters who saw their country torn apart would have, and results in a film where Godzilla isn’t just a sea monster run amok, he’s the combined suffering of every person in post-war Japan.

With every single movie in the series having stuck with the idea that Godzilla first appeared in modern history in 1954, Godzilla Minus One had the space to play in an area that hasn’t been seen before. Granted, it’s a touch close to the original’s time period, but with the scars of war so much more raw there is a stronger sense of grief than in other, especially more modern films, and with the technology to defeat Godzilla more primitive than ever before the struggle is palpable.

Godzilla Minus One is proof that Toho’s slower, more deliberate release schedule has resulted in some of the best films in the franchise. The animated films they released between Shin Godzilla and Minus One could have also been great – they were certainly unique enough – if they’d been told over a single, condensed story. Spending time to tap into what people are afraid of, and how to best represent it in giant reptilian form is the key to a great Godzilla film, and Minus One shows that there’s still plenty of gas in tank, and more unique ways to show Godzilla powering up his nuclear breath.

Verdict: While it means we’ll never see a continuation of the fascinating Shin Godzilla, Minus One keeps things simple and delivers an excellently honest and dramatic story with plenty of destruction to boot.

Overall entertainment: 9/10
Violence: 5/10
Sex: 0/10
Themes: 8/10
Effects: Easily the best Toho have ever produced
Secret MVP: Tachibana
Scenes of Shikishima waking up: Easily a dozen

———–

Godzilla Minus One (2023)
Japanese

Director: Takashi Yamazaki
Writer: Takashi Yamazaki

CAST

Ryunosuke Kamiki – Koichi Shikishima
Minami Hamabe – Noriko Oishi
Yuki Yamada – Shiro Mizushima
Munetaka Aoki – Sosaku Tachibana
Hidetaka Yoshioka – Kenji Noda
Sakura Ando – Sumiko Ota
Kuranosuke Sasaki – Yoji Akitsu
Sae Nagatani – Akiko
Mio Tanaka – Tatsuo Hotta
Yuya Endo – Tadamasa Saito