Godzilla Minus One is a rare beast: a viscerally arresting monster flick with legitimate emotional stakes.
Next month, Hollywood’s latest Godzilla movie will hit theaters. Titled Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, it will join Warner Bros.’ “MonsterVerse,” a glitzy American spin on a formula that Toho Pictures began in 1954 with the original Godzilla. The film features a fearsome monster doing battle with King Kong and other beasts, while an all-star cast looks on in horror. But although Hollywood’s approach to translating the monster has relied on pure silly spectacle—understandable for a series about a nuclear lizard beast smashing cities—Japan has, of late, found new and original angles on its kaiju hero. The newest, Godzilla Minus One, was good enough to draw a surprising amount of attention in the U.S., a signal that domestic audiences are open to high-concept spins on familiar characters.
Made to celebrate the franchise’s 70th anniversary, Godzilla Minus One is the creation of the Japanese auteur Takashi Yamazaki, a visual-effects innovator with a long run of success in his country. The original Godzilla tapped into Japan’s anxieties about nuclear fallout after Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Godzilla Minus One takes place from 1945 to 1947, in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender. Despair and loss pervade the film: The protagonist is Kōichi Shikishima (played by Ryunosuke Kamiki), a pilot struggling with survivor’s guilt from making it through both the war and an attack from a not-yet-fully-grown Godzilla, who destroyed a military base where he was stationed.
Kōichi is haunted by his cowardice in the face of the monster and by the wartime devastation of Tokyo, which has left him without a home or family. He takes up with a woman named Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and a child named Akiko (Sae Nagatani)—both also orphaned by the war—and becomes a minesweeper, trawling the sea for unexploded ordinance with other disaffected veterans. Into this uneasy present wanders Godzilla, now gigantic and mutated by nuclear testing.
Over his 70 years of stardom, Godzilla has been variously depicted as a rampaging destructive force (in the early films), an evolutionary system keeping the world in balance, and an avenging angel doing battle with even worse monsters. His films, broken into different eras with loose continuity, range from horrifying to goofily camp. But his portrayal in Godzilla Minus One might be the most terrifying I’ve ever seen on-screen—he’s not just shambling through buildings and stomping on cars; he’s wrecking city blocks with singular purpose. His “atomic breath,” a mainstay of the series since the beginning, is represented by Yamazaki as a pulverizing nuclear blast that creates new mushroom clouds on the horizon.
Read: The paradox at the heart of Godzilla
It’s scary. I’ve seen plenty of Godzilla movies and enjoyed most of them, but the title character has rarely been so frightening to behold. Of the American attempts, Gareth Edwards’s 2014 Godzilla came closest by emphasizing the scale of the creature, shrouding him in darkness and doling out his terrible roar with admirable restraint. Though I like that film, the humans in it are either boring or plainly risible, a problem in many a Godzilla—while the monster spectacle may draw in viewers, Godzilla himself takes up only a slim chunk of a run time largely devoted to people running around in awe and horror.
That is why Godzilla Minus One is a great film rather than merely an impressive feat of monstrous visual effects (although those were justly Oscar-nominated last month, the first time a Japanese film has received a nod in that category). Kōichi is not just a cipher who exists to move the narrative along; his personal guilt and sense of hopelessness about Japan’s future are successfully entwined with the wider destruction being wrought by the monster. Kōichi’s crew of misfit survivors on the minesweeper ship, portrayed by a charming bunch of veteran Japanese character actors, are all clinging to vague hope as they look for a way to stop Godzilla. Yamazaki has said that he saw modern parallels in his story too, particularly in the national sense of confusion and futility during the early months of COVID.
Whether you focus on the historical analogy or the contemporary one, the point of Godzilla Minus One is the same: Triumphing over the monster is less about destroying him and more about finding the will to live after a great cataclysm. These are deeply affecting emotional stakes, and they help the film stand as an impressive counter to the previous Godzilla film released by Toho Pictures, Hideki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s brilliant Shin Godzilla, which was a bald-faced satire of modern governmental incompetence in the face of a kaiju attack. Viewed back to back, the films reveal how impressively versatile the series can still be; they also make Hollywood’s endless slap-fest between Godzilla and King Kong or a slew of other, anonymous monsters feel even more juvenile.
Godzilla Minus One was warmly received in Japan, and its American reception has been especially surprising. On top of the Oscar nomination, the film has grossed $56 million in the U.S., by far the most for a Japanese Godzilla movie—in comparison, Shin Godzilla made just under $2 million—and the third-most of any foreign film in history. Its theatrical run concluded last week with a terrific black-and-white version that further emphasized Yamazaki’s despairing tone. Godzilla x Kong will storm into theaters next month and should stir up plenty of ticket sales on its own, but as audiences understand how artfully made and visually arresting these movies can be, they may lose interest in the corny American knockoffs.
A Godzilla Movie That’s Actually Terrifying
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06.02.2024
Godzilla Minus One is a rare beast: a viscerally arresting monster flick with legitimate emotional stakes.
Next month, Hollywood’s latest Godzilla movie will hit theaters. Titled Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, it will join Warner Bros.’ “MonsterVerse,” a glitzy American spin on a formula that Toho Pictures began in 1954 with the original Godzilla. The film features a fearsome monster doing battle with King Kong and other beasts, while an all-star cast looks on in horror. But although Hollywood’s approach to translating the monster has relied on pure silly spectacle—understandable for a series about a nuclear lizard beast smashing cities—Japan has, of late, found new and original angles on its kaiju hero. The newest, Godzilla Minus One, was good enough to draw a surprising amount of attention in the U.S., a signal that domestic audiences are open to high-concept spins on familiar characters.
Made to celebrate the franchise’s 70th anniversary, Godzilla Minus One is the creation of the Japanese auteur Takashi Yamazaki, a visual-effects innovator with a long run of success in his country. The original Godzilla tapped into Japan’s anxieties about nuclear fallout after Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Godzilla Minus One takes place from 1945 to 1947, in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s surrender. Despair and loss pervade the film: The protagonist is Kōichi Shikishima (played by Ryunosuke Kamiki), a pilot........
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