Godzilla Minus One
TOHO
Next year, Godzilla will celebrate its 70th birthday with Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which will likely be a massive pile of garbage. So instead of waiting for Hollywood to get Godzilla right, turn to Toho, who has produced over twenty-five live-action productions involving the Big G since Ishiro Honda brought him to life in 1954. The franchise has been inconsistent but has always fit with the times it portrayed on screen: from parable to the horrors of the nuclear weapon, to superhero role model for the smallest viewers, a figure of the peace & love movement, acting as a warning for policymakers leading society to their environmental doom, and an allegory for political paranoïa, Godzilla has seen and represented it all.
So it’s only fitting that the next logical step of Toho’s kaiju eiga is to retcon Godzilla’s inception to post-war Japan, where Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who refuses to sacrifice himself, meets the literal and figurative version of Hell itself through Godzilla, who viciously murders each inhabitant of Odo Island after Shikishama disobeys a direct order and flees the scene of battle.
Once he returns to Tokyo, he sees his house destroyed, and his family has perished from the war. Shikishima is alone, expressing deep survivor’s guilt and trauma from the war and what he’s seen until he meets Noriko (Minami Hanabe), who is looking for a place to stay with Akiko (Sae Nagatani), a baby who lost her parents during an air raid. The three start to build their life together until Godzilla reemerges from the depths of the sea and unleashes his fiery atomic breath upon Ginza, where the horrors of war are still imbued in the collective minds of the citizens who now have to face a bigger threat than they did before.
Less politically dense as Toho’s last live-action Godzilla film, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla, director Takashi Yamazaki crafts a more crowd-pleasing affair, with the Big G arguably being the highlight of the picture. He hasn’t been this vicious since 1984’s The Return of Godzilla, where Toho completely moved away from how Ishiro Honda and Jun Fukuda began to portray him in the Showa Era as a figure of imagination and wonder for children.
The Return of Godzilla saw the titular character return to the horrific presence that Honda initially presented him as, and one of the most potent images sees it suck out the energy from a nuclear reactor to power its atomic breath as he slowly inhales the fumes to awaken all of its senses. Godzilla Minus One presents the monster in that same vein: with a growl that’s even more terrifying than the variations audiences have heard it scream for over seventy years. There’s no humanity that Miki Saegusa (Megumi Odaka) attempted to convince the G-Force in the Heisei movies.
Godzilla here inhabits the nadir of the horrors of war — as the country is slowly recovering from so much trauma and loss, here’s something that will completely break people who were looking for a way to move forward in life from what they have witnessed in World War II. The most terrifying image in the film occurs when Godzilla looks at a mushroom cloud of smoke after completely destroying Ginza with its atomic breath in awe, growling in celebration at the countless lives lost as it continues to trample all over Japan.
Godzilla has never been more terrifying — and likely never will. Yamazaki represents its atomic breath as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, something so powerful that not even the strongest atomic weapons will ever match it. As Gareth Edwards represented the atomic breath as an object of attraction and bewilderment in his 2014 reinterpretation of Godzilla, where it felt like Godzilla’s last power move to finish an enemy, it’s the most unnerving thing anyone will witness here.
Godzilla has been reinterpreted to death in so many ways that filmmakers have ultimately forgotten what made it such a scary creature in the first place. In Godzilla Minus One, Yamazaki ensures that audiences will leave the theater horrified at the images of pure destruction and terror they’ve been subjected to and that Godzilla, as heroic as he might have been with Jet Jaguar in Godzilla vs. Megalon, is no hero, and will always be the representation of Japan’s anxieties and terrors in a world that continues to destroy itself.
When Yamazaki represents its atomic breath as an extension of its self – with Godzilla’s body literally growing bigger as it breathes in before blowing up Ginza, it’s all clearly laid out that the character is not as heroic as Toho once thought it was, and that a reappraisal is long overdue. In that sense, the action scenes involving the Big G are jaw-dropping: there isn’t a single moment where the audience doesn’t have time to react in awe. Everyone is gasping for air as the room collectively sees what Godzilla is doing and how the military is no match for the most powerful iteration of Godzilla the world has seen. The film looks (and sounds) immaculate on an IMAX screen, though some of the visual effects work isn’t as polished as previous Toho Godzilla films were. It still doesn’t detract from its many striking images that are designed to creep everyone who thought Godzilla was a hero up at night.
That being said, the human drama this time around is ridiculously inert. The film is filled with one-note characters who become mouthpieces for jingoism as it progresses to its ending, where citizens must come together to save Japan from certain doom, all in the name of patriotism, not peace. Shikishima seems to be the most interestingly developed of the bunch at first, having to deal with the guilt of surviving the war while his parents died and the trauma of not helping his comrades when they needed him most. However, he then goes on an inherently predictable path: a kamikaze pilot who doesn’t want to die begins to believe in Japan’s jingoistic plight and is ready to sacrifice himself if it means saving the country.
However, since Akiko is in his life, what will happen next? The film withholds crucial information near the climax to make some of the reveals feel more satisfying and unexpected, but every storytelling beat can be seen a mile away. Moreover, the film contains the single worst ending in the franchise’s history, a cop-out so ridiculous it brought the audience to sheer laughter and confusion, ultimately stripping the movie’s most horrifying and emotionally potent moment for a cheap retcon that likely won’t pay off in the long run when what occurred in that sequence felt like the most vulnerable these protagonists were represented in.
It’s a shame, because the Godzilla stuff found in Godzilla: Minus One is a franchise-best, especially at painting the titular character in the scariest possible way. Godzilla was initially conveyed as an allegory of the nuclear weapon, and in a post-war setting, Yamazaki reaffirms that status by representing the kaiju at its most violent, with action so brutal no children will ever think Godzilla is a hero. If the human story were more polished, Godzilla Minus One would’ve topped Godzilla Final Wars as the best this 70-year-young franchise has offered in the collective imagination of the kaiju eiga thus far.
However, it needed more time to craft a more psychologically active story that posits the trauma directly with Godzilla’s voracious destruction, as opposed to giving protagonists one-note attributes and a middle finger of an ending. As galaxy-brained as some of the early Godzilla films were, none had the gall to do what Yamazaki did here, and that’s saying a lot. Here’s hoping the next batch of Toho films will see the Big G dominate the screen with a human story as poignant and emotionally investing as the ones drawn in the Heisei era.