Review: Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One meets and exceeds all expectations, as the walking nuclear nightmare channels the trauma of his human victims in a manner both harrowing and heart-rending.

Godzilla Minus One is a monumental example of a film that succeeds beyond the boundaries of its genre. Amazingly, writer-director Takashi Yamazaki achieves this goal not by fashioning a revisionist take that eschews the well-mined veins of the 70-year-old franchise. Instead, he follows those veins to their mother lode, digging deeper to extract their full potential – for both monster mayhem and human pathos. Forged into an alloy, these elements create a deeply moving domestic drama about post-war Japan recovering from its wounds, merged with a brutal horror movie featuring the monster as the living embodiment of the characters’ – and the nation’s – traumatized psyche.

The result is not merely a good Godzilla movie, a good monster movie, or a good blockbuster. It is, quite simply, an extraordinary movie by any measure – one that proves (if proof were still necessary) that the oft-derided radioactive reptile deserves to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with King Kong among the pantheon of classic movie monsters. In short, Godzilla Minus One is a must-see for genre fans and general audiences alike.

Godzilla Minus One Review: Kamikaze

Godzilla Minus One begins with kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) landing his plane on Odo Island¹ due to “engine failure,” which the ground grew is unable to find. He receives some initial sympathy (why should he throw his life away for a war obviously lost?), but then “Gojira”² (as we are told the local islanders call him) appears. Apparently a local deity who brings deep-sea fish with him when he appears, the creature somewhat resembles a T-Rex in size and shape. The mechanics beg Koichi to use the machineguns on his grounded plane to kill the beast, but he chokes, fearing that he will only attract Gojira’s attention to himself. Consequently, the entire ground crew is killed except for Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) who guilt-trips Koichi by “gifting” him with a packet of photos of the dead men.

Haunted by guilt, Koichi returns home after Japan’s surrender, only to be upbraided by a neighbor, Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando) who demands to know how he could dare to show his face: “If you had done your job [i.e., die in combat], my children wouldn’t be dead!” He later meets a homeless woman name Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe), who has unofficially adopted an orphaned child; the two try to scrap together some form of life in the post-war ruins of Tokyo. However, plagued by his cowardice, Koichi suffers PTSD nightmares of his encounter with Gojira on Odo Island.

The nightmare soon comes roaring back to life. The 1946 U.S. nuclear bomb test at Bikini Atoll mutates Gojira in a blinding flash of red-hot radiation, burning away the creature’s flesh, his reptilian eye glaring with pain and rage. When next he appears, the creature is no longer the limber therapod seen on Odo Island but an enlarged and enraged hulking behemoth that seems hell-bent on wanton destruction, furiously destroying battleships and overturning buildings fortunate enough to have survived the bombings during the war.

After seeing a loved one literally blown away by the shockwave from Godzilla’s atomic breath, Koichi joins the effort to destroy the monster. With Japan’s military in ruins, and the United States wary of assistance for fear of provoking the Soviet Union, a band of private citizens (mostly ex-military) form a plan, which involves weighting Godzilla down to drag him deep into the ocean, where the intense pressure will kill him. Aware of Godzilla’s ability to regenerate after being wounded, Koichi is doubtful this strategy will succeed, so he devises his own plan: fly a warplane, loaded with bombs, into Godzilla’s mouth, kamikaze-style, hoping that the internal head injury will be the one thing that can truly destroy the monster….

Godzilla Minus One Review: PTSD & Postwar Traum

A simple plot synopsis of Godzilla Minus One does little justice to writer, director, and special effects supervisor Takashi Yamazaki’s achievement. He deftly integrates elements of plot, characterization, and theme in a way that is rich, complex, and emotionally engaging – while never making his 122-minute film feel over-long, convoluted, or muddled. Instead, the details accumulate to maximize the film’s impact, which hits the audience on multiple levels.

Clearly, this is a film about recovering from post-war trauma. Koichi, our human protagonist, suffers from not only PTSD but also survivor’s guilt. As a failed kamikaze pilot, his simply being alive feels like an insult to the war’s other survivors, and he is acutely ashamed of his own cowardice. If Koichi is the microcosm of postwar Japan, Godzilla is the macrocosm. The monstrous antagonist embodies Koichi’s trauma and guilt, but Godzilla is too gargantuan to be just one man’s white whale; the radioactive beast also stands for the nationwide suffering. As the film’s title implies, World War II reduced Japan to nothing, and Godzilla reduces it to even less than nothing.

What is amazing about Godzilla Minus One, is the way Yamazaki is able to ladle on layers of guilt and despair that grow heavy and heavier as the film progresses without ever feeling contrived or overdone. Described in mere words, the burden Koichi bears sounds almost ridiculous, and yet we are with him every step of the way. Obviously, it is absurd for Sumiko to declare that Koichi is literally responsible for the death of her children, and yet the accusation feels emotionally true – to Koichi and to us. To a large extent, Godzilla’s presence validates Sumiko’s charge: his failure as a kamikaze pilot may not have caused the bombing of Tokyo, but his failure to kill Gojira when it appeared on Odo Island may very well have resulted in the monster surviving to attack the city years later. Thus, Godzilla is carefully integrated into the narrative as the dark avatar of Koichi’s failure, and yet the film is not just about one man’s redemption arc; rather, Koichi stands in for the country as a whole, trying to rebuild itself from the ashes.

Yamazaki manages to pull this off without seeming trite. Largely this is because Godzilla Minus One is so well crafted: the writing, performances, and staging ground the film in a believable human story, in which a simple long shot of someone washing dishes caps a scene with a convincing sense of wished-for but unachieved relief from the horrors of the past.

More than this, elements that at first seem unnecessarily complicated are actually part of a sophisticated approach to the story and theme. Is it not enough that Koichi is a failed kamikaze pilot? Why must he also miss his chance to kill Gojira on Odo Island? It may seem like overkill – an excuse to see the monster and forge a connection between antagonist and protagonist early in the film. In reality, however, something more sophisticated is going on. Those two elements provide a contrast that the film will explore later.

When Koichi abandoned his mission as a kamikaze pilot, he declined to throw his life away on a lost cause. When he failed to act on Odo Island, he refused to risk his life when it could have made a difference to his comrades. These are two different things, and Yamazaki uses them to build an incredibly suspenseful climax in which Koichi seeks to expatiate his guilt by finally seeing his mission through. The question really is whether he has finally gained his courage, or is he merely acting out a death wish born of trauma and despair?

When a nation’s survival is at stake, how much is one willing to risk or sacrifice? Is sacrifice truly noble if it is not absolutely necessary? If Koichi finally becomes the kamikaze pilot he was meant to be, is he becoming a hero, or is he succumbing to the misguided ethos that led his country to devalue the life of its soldiers and citizens? Or could it be that something as terrifying as Godzilla cannot be overcome except by the ultimate sacrifice of one’s own life?

Godzilla Minue One Review: Life or Death?

This last question points to another clever element of Godzilla Minus One. Though the film stands fully on its own, it references scenes, ideas, and themes from Godzilla’s long cinematic history in ways that are more than mere fan service. The film borrows elements from the Hesei (1985-1995)³ and Millennium (1999-2004) Godzilla films,⁴ but it is most closely connected to the 1954 original, Gojira (released in the U.S. as Godzilla, King of the Monsters). Besides Godzilla originating near Odo Island, the two films share scenes of Godzilla attacking a train, the destruction of Nippon Theatre, journalists crashing to their deaths while reporting on Godzilla’s rampage through Tokyo, and a depiction of post-war gloom afflicting Japan in the shadow of nuclear destruction (the latter is even more pronounced in the Godzilla Minus One Minus Color version, wherein the black-and-white photography evokes not only the period setting but also the downbeat visual tone of Gojira).

However, the most important connection between the two films resides in their respective heroes, Koichi in Godzilla Minus One and Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) in Gojira. In the 1954 film, Serisawa chooses to heroically sacrifice his life in order to destroy Godzilla, andGodzilla  Minus One recreates so much of the earlier’ film’s vibe that the audience fully expects Koichi to do something similar.

Certainly, the setup, with Koichi failing to complete his kamikaze mission, seems to be pointing in that direction. Throughout the film he questions his continued existence, wondering whether those whose lives he failed to save are haunting him, destroying his every hope of leading a normal life. At his lowest point, he even wonders whether he is in fact already dead; his hoped-for happiness with Noriko nothing but an illusory dream in his rotting brain. Will anything less than death atone for his cowardice and bring him peace?

The film offers a counterpoint to this motif in the form of continual exhortations to live, all of whom have suffered horribly but feel a duty to survive on behalf of the loved ones they lost. “My war isn’t over yet,” say Koichi, reminding us that his problem is largely internal. For all the tragedy he has suffered, fate has been relatively kind, gifting him with the opportunity to start a new life with Norkio and her adopted child. In effect, a pre-made family has landed in his lap, but he cannot bring himself accept the gift.

Thus, the film pings back and for between Life and Death, until Koichi, feeling that all hope is lost, decides that the only way to destroy Godzilla is by flying a kamikaze mission into the beast’s open mouth.

The question of course is whether this is the noble, moral thing to do or selfish, revenge-fueled suicide. The film’s arguments in favor of embracing life are at least as strong, but Koichi’s conflicting impulses are so balanced that the audience is legitimately on the edge of its collective seat as he makes his fatal kamikaze flight. It is a tribute to Ryunosuke Kamiki’s performance (and of course the script) that every viewer feels as if they are in the plane with him, risking everything to not just destroy the monster but to finally put to rest the ghosts of war haunting him and his country.

Godzilla Minus One Review: Premium Large Formats & Special Presentations

Godzilla Minus One was released in a premium large formats and other special presentations. For its opening night “fan event,” it was presented in IMAX, probably the best format for conveying the massive monster on screen. Some theatres offered motion-simulation presentations such as MX4D, making the audience feel as if they were being rocked and knocked about by the destruction onscreen.

For its final week in theatres, Godzilla Minus One was in a “Minus Color” version, that rendered the film in black-and-white. The process involved not just removing the color but enhancing the contrast and shadows to help keep fine details visible. Though not entirely successful in our opinion, this version captured more of the vintage feel of the original Gojira (1954), making it a worthwhile alternative. Our main objection is that the brief underwater closeup of Godzilla’s angry eye as his skin is burned by a nuclear blast loses something without the red tint.

Godzilla Minus One Review: Conclusion

Like characters in a post-apocalypse anime, the people in Godzilla Minus One are existing but not really living. The war may be over, but aftereffects live on inside their minds and souls. Reduced to a state of mere survival, they gradually dare to hope for something more – until even that dim glimmer is extinguished beneath Godzilla’s thunderous footfalls. Only a communal effort by those who dare to dream of a better future can put to rest the ghosts of the war. Whether success requires self-sacrifice is a question the film grapples with carefully – and cleverly, setting up expectations that can lead to either outcome. In the end, the message is that the Japanese wartime government cared too little about the lives of its citizens and soldiers, and any possible bright future depends on overthrowing that attitude.

The film’s message is delivered with profound impact that enhances narrative. This is perhaps Godzilla Minus One‘s greatest achievement. In much the same way that D.H. Lawrence wrote that Moby Dick manages to never stop being an adventurous whale hunt in spite of the layers of symbolism, Godzilla Minus One never stops being a spectacularly exciting monster movie. While keeping Godzilla largely offscreen, Takashi Yamazaki makes the beast’s appearance count, turning each one into a memorable set piece, referencing not only previous kaiju films but also American blockbusters like Jurassic Park (Godzilla’s T-Rex-like attack on Odo Island) and Jaws (Koich firing his gun to detonate the bomb in Godzilla’s mouth). All of this is rendered with Oscar-winning special effects that bring Godzilla to life like never before. The CGI is not just technically impressive; it creates a performance, revealing the monsters rage through facial expressions and body language, in a way that is awesome in the original definition of the word.

In short, Godzilla Minus One is the triumphant climax of Godzilla’s 70-year career. Its success guarantees future films from Toho (in addition to the American productions from Legacy Films), but it is difficult to imagine a follow-up that will top this.

Godzilla Minus One Review: Footnotes

1. A fictional island from which Godzilla hailed in his first movie, 1954’s Gojira.
2. This is the name by which Godzilla is known in his native Japan.
3. Examples from the Hesei Era: Godzilla’s regenerative ability first appeared in Godzilla vs. Biolante (1989). The depiction in Godzilla Minus One of a pre-mutated Godzilla as a dinosaur on an island during World War II is lifted from Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991); in both cases, atomic weapons mutate the dinosaur into the monster known as Godzilla. Godzilla’s attack on the battleship in Minus One visually echos his battle with the submarine in Godzilla Tokyo SOS.
4. Examples from the Millennium Era: Godzilla’s radioactive breath causing a mushroom cloud like a nuclear bomb is borrowed from Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack (2001); that film also contains a shot of a schoolteacher looking out through a window reflecting the blast, which is echoed in Godzilla Minus One when Noriko looks through a train window reflecting Godzilla. The redemption arc of a military character whose mistake cost comrades’ lives, including a seemingly suicidal plane run aimed at Godzilla, is from Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000); a similar scenario plays out in Godzilla vs Mechgodzilla (2002), ending with a plane in Godzilla’s mouth.

Godzilla Minus One Photographs