Review: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

 Godzilla Minus One (Gojira Mainasu Wan) (2023)

Rated PG-13 for creature violence and action

Score: 5 out of 5

The Godzilla movies, at least in their original Japanese flavor, have never been subtle. The 1954 original being a plain-as-day metaphor for nuclear weapons is a central part of the mythos and folklore of not only the character, but also, by extension, all of the giant monster movies that emerged in its wake. Over the years, the series has used Godzilla and his foes as metaphors for environmental destruction, the world's reactions to Japan's postwar economic ascent, and (in the recent Shin Godzilla) the devastation of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. This is something that I've always felt even the better American Godzilla movies missed, that their main message was always "giant monster battles are awesome (and us puny humans should respect nature more)," and conversely, why I still love Cloverfield as a better Hollywood take on this kind of monster movie than any of its official cracks at the Big G.

And the latest Godzilla movie continues the tradition, and in doing so produces one of the best movies in the entire franchise. This time around, the message is about love of one's country, specifically the difference between its vices and its virtues. It is a distinctly anti-government, and particularly anti-military, film that depicts blind faith in one's leaders to the point of being willing to die for them as a foolish endeavor that gets one killed, one born from a distinctly postwar Japanese mindset on the subject -- but at the same time, it's no Randian tract, but a film in which the heroes are ordinary people who unite around a common cause for the benefit of all. It's a film that celebrates Japan and its people while condemning the "great men" who had led the nation to ruin in the imperial era, courtesy of a filmmaker, Takashi Yamazaki, whose previous film The Great War of Archimedes was a historical drama about the construction of the Yamato battleship that portrayed the entire project as a mess of graft, bloat, and outdated thinking on warfare for the sake of a narrow vision of national prestige. It's a movie that's as interested in its human characters as it is in the monster mayhem central to any Godzilla movie, and it provided a great protagonist who I not only rooted for, but one whose arc and ultimate fate remained in doubt up until the very end in the best way possible.

But it's still a Godzilla movie, too. And while the monster is used sparingly, the film makes no bones about what a terrifying beast he is, with every appearance he makes delivering grand-scale carnage resembling something out of a Hollywood blockbuster with ten times the budget. It's a kaiju movie dropped into a historical drama, and the film's two sides elevate one another, not only providing a unique environment for Godzilla to stomp around in (and one replete with homages to the original film) but also adding a new spin on the message of the original movie. This is easily one of the finest films this series has ever produced, and it's in the running for my list of the best films of 2023.

The film takes place in Japan in 1947, less than two years after the nation surrendered at the end of World War II. Tokyo, firebombed by the Americans during the war, still has many neighborhoods that look as though Godzilla had graced them with his presence, most notably the one where Kōichi Shikishima and Noriko Ōishi live in a glorified shack, hastily assembled with what little money and resources they could gather. Kōichi is a veteran, specifically a kamikaze pilot in the last days of the war who got cold feet and turned back to Odo Island for "repairs", where he watched a fifty-foot, dinosaur-like sea monster, known to the island's locals as "Godzilla", tear apart the small Japanese garrison on the island -- a monster that he's spent the rest of his life wondering if he could've stopped. Noriko, meanwhile, is a young woman orphaned in the bombings who is raising a little girl, Keiko, who also lost her own birth parents, and who moves in with Kōichi so that they can both support each other.

From the introduction on Odo Island, we see Godzilla presented not so much as a representation of the nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but one of the nation that dropped them. The soldiers could've easily hid and let Godzilla pass, but one of them just had to start shooting and drawing it to fight back, even commanding Kōichi to hop into the cockpit of his plane and try to shoot Godzilla with its 30mm cannons -- a move that, as we see later when much bigger guns are turned on Godzilla, probably would've just gotten him killed (which, apparently, the novelization explicitly states). Kōichi being a failed kamikaze pilot isn't just an incidental detail here. It's used to paint Godzilla as the Americans after Pearl Harbor, a pissed-off, seemingly unstoppable force that, unlike prior animalistic portrayals of the monster, seems to outright enjoy laying waste to Tokyo. Its terror, moreover, was invited by Japan's cocky, foolhardy leadership as they picked on someone way more than their own size and threw away the lives of their people in the name of preserving their honor, telling them that their deaths in battle would be glorious. Even as an American, I didn't need much of a history lesson to figure out the parallels between Godzilla's rampage in the opening scene and Japan finding out after fucking around in 1941, 82 years ago today.

And even after the war, with the totality of Japan's defeat, many people's first instinct in the face of a threat is to simply give up, preoccupied more with their own survival than anything. Men like Kōichi who fought in the war can barely look at themselves afterwards, shamed by their neighbors back home for having "failed". If only they'd fought harder, if only they hadn't been cowards, the war could've been won, many seem to think, all while those veterans are gripped by PTSD, night terrors, and panic attacks. This, too, is no way to live, the film argues, especially once the Americans, after its nuclear tests inadvertently turn Godzilla from a "mere" fifty feet tall into the fire-breathing mega-monster we know and love, abandon Japan to its fate because sending the full force of the US military to fight it might provoke the Soviets. In the end, this is a story about Japan, and more importantly the Japanese people, learning to stand up for themselves when nobody else -- not the Americans, not their own ineffective government -- will. With emphasis on "learn", because here, Godzilla is defeated not by fighting harder, the strategy that led Japan to catastrophe in the war, but by fighting smarter, figuring out its weaknesses and then exploiting them to the fullest. (Am I detecting a bit of admiration for how, to paraphrase Mr. Takagi from Die Hard, Japan ultimately got us with tape decks after Pearl Harbor didn't work out?)

Beyond just the plot and characters being top-notch, especially by the standards of a Godzilla movie (a series that's kind of infamous for being very "screw the plot, get to the monsters," for better or worse), there's also the matter of Godzilla itself. The monster is smaller this time around, bucking the trend of escalation that this series has long gone for in favor of scaling it down to its size from the 1954 film, but as your insecure best friend in high school always said, it's not the size, it's how you use it. Even a monster that's "only" 150 feet tall is still a monster that's 150 feet tall, and this film shows it tearing up naval warships, chasing a minesweeping boat, tossing train cars and boats like ragdolls, smashing buildings into rubble, and using its atomic breath in a manner that calls to mind an atomic bomb more than ever. It's easy to forget that there are only really four major scenes where Godzilla is on screen, because in each and every one of those scenes, the monster was so impactful and terrifying that it always hung over the rest of the film. I've seen a lot of people impressed by how this film cost only $15 million to make and wondering why Hollywood can't pull off the same with comparable budgets, and while I would like to remind people here that Cloverfield cost no more than $30 million and delivered just as much grade-A monster mayhem (short version: big-name stars tend to devour your budget, and there's a lot of bloat beyond that in blockbuster filmmaking), that doesn't take away from the accomplishments of Yamazaki or the effects team. This movie is beautiful, raw, and terrifying.

The rest of the production values are also outstanding. I can't really judge line delivery in another language, but I will say that Kōichi's actor Ryunosuke Kamiki was outstanding. He felt like a guy who'd seen some shit on Odo Island and still hadn't let go of it. His reaction to seeing Godzilla destroying Tokyo, without spoiling anything, was the kind of thing that made me not want to see Godzilla destroy Tokyo, a moment that took the human toll of the awesome carnage that these kinds of movies are built on and made it personal. The rest of the cast was also excellent, as was the set design that captured not only the historic time and place of late '40s Japan but also the feeling of deprivation. Kōichi and Noriko's home and community reminded me of shantytowns in Latin America, Africa, and India, a far cry from the nation that Japan would reemerge as, and it did a lot to sell me on the idea that these two, and the Japanese people as a whole, had lost everything in the war and been thrown back to "year zero" when it came to their development, the film's title implying that Godzilla will somehow find a way to throw them back even further. From top to bottom, and not just in the special effects, this was a movie that looked and felt alive.

The Bottom Line

Godzilla Minus One is one of my favorite films of the year and one of the best movies of its kind ever made. I'm glad that it found its audience in the US and is getting a wide theatrical run this weekend, because it is just a wonderful movie that I can't recommend highly enough.