Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Original title: Gojira -1.0

During the last stages of World War II, kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) decides not to throw away his life for nothing and lands at a small island base for repairs to his not actually damaged plane.

At night, a large lizard creature that looks much smaller than the Godzilla we know and love attacks the base, killing everyone but Shikishima and the mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki). Because he freezes up during a moment of danger that may or may not have been decisive, Shikishima adds another dollop of guilt to the bag his not having committed suicide by plane has already filled rather heavily. It certainly doesn’t help that Tachibana puts everything on Shikishima, leaving him with the family photos the other mechanics on the island were carrying with them as a goodbye gift.

After the war, returned to a destroyed Tokyo, with all of his family or friends dead, Shikishima drifts until he meets Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who has taken it upon herself to take care of an orphaned baby named Akiko. When Noriko with the baby simply follows him home, he just as simply lets them stay.

Eventually, Shikishima manages to get a dangerous but comparatively well-paid job on a wooden mine clearing ship that will pay for the found family’s survival. There, he also finds his first actual close human contact apart from Noriko and little Akiko, in form of the ship’s captain Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), former military engineer Noda (Hidetaki Yoshioka) and the very young – so young he wasn’t drafted into the war and gets starry-eyed about something everyone else on board ship wants to forget – Mizushima (Yuki Yamada). He’s not exactly close to anyone, mind you, for his sense of failure and guilt as well as good old PTSD do tend to make him keep everyone around him at an emotional remove. Yet there is a degree of loosening up happening for him.

So slowly, Shikishima appears on the way of healing, until Godzilla, now mutated and made even angrier and much larger by US nuclear tests, and basically indestructible by any conventional means, re-emerges and begins to attack Japan. This shortly after the war, the Japanese Defence Force lies in the future, and the US are at a stage in their dance with the Soviet Union where they’re afraid to provoke the latter by any military moves, so the Japanese people find themselves unprotected and underinformed. Eventually, Shikishima, his trauma raw again, will become part of a somewhat crazy civilian plan to destroy Godzilla; though he also has a plan of his own to make up for his “failure” as a kamikaze.

But, and that’s important, Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is not at all a film that condones the kind of “heroic” sacrifice its protagonist is attempting, but rather one that argues that there’s something wrong with the glorification of young men throwing their lives away on the battlefield. Like in Honda’s initial Godzilla, the film at hand, while enjoying the spectacle of warships and arms, does argue against the idea of war as a glorious or even just politically sensible thing – here, war is a waste of humanity that leaves behind broken people populating a broken country, and actual heroism is people doing dangerous things out of their own free will not because their potential death will be glorious but because they have to be done.

Minus One explores these thoughts, as well as Shikishima’s specific trauma, with a surprising love for complexity and depth for a film that could get away with being a nostalgic monster mash or just a bit of silly fun without anyone complaining. Instead, this focusses on ideas and on its characters to a degree that is often dangerous in a kaiju movie – we are, after all, here to watch everyone’s favourite lizard smash Tokyo, and not for watching traumatized men (this is a film predominantly about men, which is the movie’s only weakness) in a traumatized country. However, the writing is so strong, the film’s conviction in its portrayal of people, places and time so great, and Yamazaki so effective at staging emotional moments that mostly don’t feel manipulative but just somewhat larger than life to make life clearer, there’s none of the dreaded “waiting for the monster” here.

Godzilla really isn’t the main point of the film, but a catalyst that drags the inner lives of the characters and their country to the surface, exploring what’s wrong and what’s worth saving, and why.

This doesn’t mean that the kaiju scenes aren’t effective. In fact, Godzilla’s rampage through Ginza is one of the most impactful scenes of its kind I’ve seen – and I’ve seen most of them – emphasising the horror and the trauma of the event, the human cost, and the awesome (in the old meaning of the word) impact of Godzilla on Japan not as an abstraction called a country but as a conglomerate of individual people.

Apart from its insistence on actually being about something and its ability to pull this off, there are many little things to admire here: for example the way the soundtrack keeps away from the classic Ifukube themes for nearly the first half of its running time and then uses it score that horrifying Ginza scenes, recontexualizing them as much as those scenes of chirpy pop playing to something particularly unpleasant in a horror movie do; or Yamazaki’s incredible ability to pace narrative and emotional arc of the film while also creating scenes of real suspense and interest.

Despite its two hour running time, its long-ish time scale, and its general vibe of being a slick, big production with all that comes with that sort of thing, this is also a wonderfully lean film. There’s no bloat here, no scene that doesn’t help carry the film’s weight – there’s nothing here that is not in service of Godzilla Minus One’s specific goals as a narrative. It is a rather astonishing film.