Godzilla Minus One

What’s The Movie? Godzilla Minus One

What’s It All About, JG? In 1945, a kamikaze pilot, Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), lands his plane at a repair station on Odo Island, pretending it’s malfunctioning in order to avoid completing his mission. While there, Godzilla (a relatively small version) emerges and smashes the place to smithereens. Shikishima is ordered to his plane to use the gun but freezes up and can’t open fire so almost the whole population is wiped out. Returning to Tokyo and riddled with survivor’s guilt, he first discovers his parents have been killed, then takes in Noriko Ōishi and the orphaned baby she’s caring for. Over the course of a year they slowly grow closer while Shikishima gets a job clearing mines with a whacky collection of crew (“Doc”, “The Kid”) that both sides put down during the war. At the same time, the nuclear testing mutates Godzilla and he becomes a… bigger rampaging monster? Yep! They witness Godzilla destroy a naval ship then it heads landward to wreck as much of Japan as the special effects budget can stretch to. During this attack, Noriko sacrifices herself to save Shikishima. Finally, Godzilla uses its heat ray to trigger what is very obviously a nuclear explosion, before returning to the sea. Doc, along with a collection of citizens and some decommissioned ships, contrives a plan to take out Godzilla by sinking it to the bottom of the sea and then shooting it back up again while Shikishima distracts it from the air in the lone plane Japan has post World War II. Shikishima, now suicidal after the loss of Noriko, sees this as his chance to redeem the deaths on Odo Island, and once Godzilla has been sunk and resurfaced, flies the plane loaded with explosives into Godzilla’s mouth… only to eject at the last second. Godzilla is stopped and, in the final scene, we discover Norkio survived and is in hospital.

And in the final shot… Godzilla survived too.

Why Did You Give It A Go? Godzilla movies fall into two camps these days – the “real” ones, made by Toho in Japan, and the “less real” ones made by Legendary in America. The American ones are generally regarded as inferior, the Japanese ones, superior. The last proper Japanese one was the well-received Shin Godzilla but Godzilla Minus One is something different – the first Godzilla movie to be nominated for an Oscar (for its special effects). It’s also been a critical darling, beloved pretty much everywhere, and praised to the heavens. Given that I like Godzilla movies anyway, there was no way I was skipping out on this.

Is It Any Good? Oh yes, it is indeed. In fact, it’s absolutely fantastic. And one of the principal reasons for this is very simple – Ryunosuke Kamiki. He gives an absolutely astonishing central performance as a man driven to the absolute edge of sanity by the war, by what he witnessed on Odo Island, by the death of his family, and the destruction of his homeland. It’s a nuanced, incredibly open, and vulnerable performance as, slowly and piece by piece, Shikishima starts to put his life back together again, only to have it shattered once more by Godzilla’s return.

One of the most adroit moves the film makes is pairing the big action set-pieces with the development of Shikishima as a character. When Godzilla first makes landfall and starts smashing things up, the destruction of property is as nothing to the destruction of his psyche as his very worst fears are realised. This works so effectively because the film doesn’t over-egg it – we are led to see how he reacts to the destruction and the emotional impact it has on him, re-igniting his survivor guilt and his feelings of cowardice at not being able to pull the trigger the first time he encountered the kaiju. This is all conveyed wordlessly and it’s left to the audience to draw the line between the two events, demonstrating the kind of audience trust so badly lacking in the American Godzilla movies.

And that’s before Shikishima apparently loses the new, developing love of his life, another layer of grief that drives him to the point where feels his life isn’t worth anything other than to be sacrificed in pursuit of his only remaining goal – Godzilla’s destruction. Again, the parallels with the reluctant kamikaze pilot at the start of the film are plain – once he was ordered to kill himself for the good of Japan but couldn’t, now he is in the same position again and willing to make that sacrifice but for entirely different reasons. But this is the core of why Godzilla Minus One is so great – it is an incredibly compassionate movie.

Because, far more than stompy-stompy lizards or whatever, what Godzilla Minus One is actually about is recovery and redemption. Shikishima may feel guilt over the events on Odo Island and indeed is forced to confront those feelings when he needs Tachibana, the lone Odo Island survivor, to repair the only plane that can be used to take out Godzilla. But, though Tachibana holds him initially responsible, both time and the intolerable pressure Shikishima has put himself under, softens Tachibana to the point where he tells Shikishima how to survive by using the ejector seat (the absence of which in most Japanese planes had been mentioned earlier in a throwaway line about how cheaply Japan valued life during the war). It would have been easy to have the character let Shikishima die while Making The Ultimate Sacrifice but that’s the whole point – the movie doesn’t want to take the easy options.

Redemption, too, comes for Japan, free of its imperial past. It’s incredibly significant that it’s a citizen’s army that stops Godzilla. Yes, there are a couple of naval officers and Doc, who was “a bigwig” during the war but the salvation of Japan comes not from gung-ho militarism, which has led the country to ruin, but from clever and brave people doing something smart to resolve the situation. It’s a complete repudiation of the militaristic approach – again, see the American Godzilla movies, which fetishize military hardware, equipment, and approaches to ridiculous degrees – and another huge tick in the favour of the movie.

And if all that sounds terribly serious, well don’t worry because Godzilla wrecking shit looks absolutely amazing too. This was a relatively low-budget movie (well, low-budget compared to its American counterparts anyway) but you’d almost never know it by looking at it. Ruined Tokyo looks just as convincing as Godzilla flattening buildings or firing its heat ray. On which subject – the explicit nuclear detonation after he fires the heat ray is a welcome acknowledgment of both Godzilla’s past as a nuclear allegory back in 1954 and the nuclear devastation of Japan by the Americans during the war. Indeed, there’s a very specific shot of a clock on top of a building that specifically references the famous Hiroshima clock that survived the bombing, drawing, again, implicit lines between the two.

But the action itself is amazing – there’s a good reason this was nominated for an Oscar and it absolutely deserves that nomination. Everything just looks real in a way that a big stompy lizard probably shouldn’t. The actor’s reactions go a long way to selling the realism of what happens but what we actually see is just remarkable. There’s the occasional moment when the lack of budget shows – a lot of shots of people doing Star Trek lurching-about while the camera shakes are clearly shot in very tight angles to disguise the fact the ships they are on are probably in a dock somewhere – but other than that, this just looks fantastic. And the effects of Godzilla’s heat rays have literally never looked better – the expanding spines on his back, then the (nuclear) blast itself puts the American versions to shame. Oh, and most importantly of all, the roar is pretty much perfect.

So if one were to summarise all this, the tl;dr is an unequivocal yes. This is a great movie, well produced, with a genuinely fantastic cast, special effects that for once actually deserve the “special” part, and a run-time that’s exactly the correct length for the movie (and yes, again, compare to American bloat and be grateful for restraint). If you’ve never seen a Godzilla movie, see this one.

How Many Of These Have You Seen? Some, though by no means all. Probably around… six or seven of the Toho ‘Zillas, including Shin and of course the amazing original. And (yes, I’ll admit it) all the American ones, including the 90s debacle, the couple of standalones, and both (to date) of the “with King Kong” ones. This, you will be unsurprised to hear at this stage, is better than any of them bar maybe the original.

Would You Recommend It? Without hesitation, yes. This is a fantastic film, full of moments both subtle and straightforward but which never becomes crass or obvious. The most obvious point the movie could tip over into that sort of area is the survival of Noriko. This could be a very cheesy moment, the back-from-the-dead survivor that somehow defied the odds. Yet it works for two reasons.

Firstly, the way that Ryunosuke Kamiki sells Shikishima’s reaction is simply an amazing feat of acting and it pushes the scene far beyond its relatively pulpy feel. You can practically see the way he finally realises that he’s not only survived World War II but his own internal wars as well. While Noriko asks the question directly – “Is your war over?” – this never feels like a cliché, at least in part because Shikishima’s response is wordless and conformation is entirely carried on the strength of Kamiki’s performance.

As a small aside here, it’s also worth noting how much restraint there is in the final scene – we don’t have swelling, sickly strings to tell us how to feel, and there’s no Big Moment Of Revelation or anything like that – the lower-key approach is taken and it allows the actors to fill in the gaps rather than the musical score or director telling us how we ought to be feeling in the moment. This is also generally true of the whole movie – the score is in fact quite excellent, normally brooding, low, and disquieting rather than loud, bombastic, and over-the-top. It makes the threat Godzilla represents feel that much more terrifying.

Anyway, secondly, it also completes the thematic aspects of the film. If this is a film about redemption, about hope, and about life winning over despair, then it feels entirely correct that Noriko gets to survive as well. She’s carried her own burdens over the course of the movie – the death of her parents in the bombing of Tokyo, caring for a baby given to her in a moment, carrying the stigma of being an unmarried woman with a child in 1945 – but she too is allowed her moment of redemption. It’s her that saves Shikishima during Godzilla’s attack and in that moment, sacrificing herself to save someone she has clearly come to love, she too earns the forgiveness and redemption that lies at the heart of the movie.

The other thing about Godzilla Minus One that’s incredibly important, and the reason it works so successfully, is that when it really comes down to it, this isn’t a movie about a big dinosaur stomping over the world. It’s a movie about how people deal with what amounts to an existential threat to their world. In this, the nuclear parallel is again very clear, but more than that, it allows us to focus on the characters that lie in the heart of the movie. It’s very reminiscent of something like Jaws which, similarly, is less a movie about a killer shark and more a movie about four men who go looking for a killer shark. It’s a significant distinction. When we do get the Godzilla action, it delivers and delivers in spades but ultimately that’s not the core of what this movie is.

Even comparatively minor characters like The Kid get perspectives and outlooks that are unique and sketch whole histories in just a few short lines. In his case, he was too young to have fought in the war which has left him feeling isolated from those around him, all of whom served and all of whom realise just how terrible that can be. In one of the most telling and pointed lines of the entire film, the Kid is told that the fact he hasn’t fought isn’t something to be ashamed of, it’s something to be proud of.

Monster movies aren’t generally known for their depth of character work, for the quality of their acting, or for their philosophical takes on the horrors of war. Godzilla Minus One may be an exception to that but it’s an incredibly welcome one and, even taking into account all the serious-minded, important work the script is doing, it’s worth pointing out just how endlessly entertaining this film is. It might not be something that’s come through as yet in this review but it’s absolutely the case – this is just an incredibly watchable film that can be by turns funny, endearing, charming, and incredibly likable, even while it’s dealing with deep personal crises or stompy-stompy Godzilla wrecking havoc wherever he’s turned up.

Ultimately, Godzilla Minus One doesn’t just live up to the hype, it far surpasses it. Even if you have never dreamed of checking out a kaiju movie or a Godzilla flick, check out this one. You won’t regret and you will be rewarded with what might just be one of the very best movies of the 2020s. It really is that good.

Scores on the Doors? 9.5/10