Holy Crap Is Godzilla Minus One Ever a Great Movie!

If you enjoy movies that fucking rock, I recommend the movie Godzilla Minus One

Like many famous monsters of filmland, Godzilla has made a striking if strangely inevitable transformation from monster to clown. In his original incarnation Godzilla was a figure of fright, a rampaging, fire-breathing, city-destroying metaphor for the almost inconceivable death and destruction of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. 

Then things took a turn. A serious monster from a serious movie about one of the most serious issues affecting mankind became kitsch and camp. When people think of comically terrible, unconvincing dubbing and monster fights made up of two stunt men in cheap suits wrestling, chances are good that they’re envisioning a mid-to-late period Godzilla movie, possibly one pitting him against his stable of allies, adversaries, allies-turned-adversaries and adversaries-turned-allies. 

In the sixty nine years since the release of 1954’s Godzilla, the other big green guy with anger management issues has headlined his own Marvel comic book and got animated in a late 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Godzilla went American in a big, bad way with Roland Emmerich's infamous 1998 blockbuster. Godzilla went American all over again in 2014 when it became part of Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse alongside Godzilla’s frenemy King Kong and his erstwhile associates Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah. 

Oh, and Godzilla also played Charles Barkley in a one on one game of basketball for a Nike commercial, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the MTV Movie Awards. Those are rare and unusual honors for a fictional metaphor for the United States at the very end of World War II.

With the exception of his sometimes friend and sometimes foe King Kong, it would be hard to envision a bigger or more ubiquitous horror icon than Godzilla. He’s everywhere. We know Godzilla. We grew up with Godzilla. Godzilla was part of our childhood. Godzilla seemingly belongs to the United States as much as it does Japan, which is crazy considering the character's origins as the living, breathing, rampaging embodiment of the almost Satanic evil of the American War Machine at its most ruthless and apocalyptic. 

In classic American fashion we took something that we wanted and purposefully ignored its metaphorical element so that we could concentrate on mindless spectacle. We didn’t want to think about our guilt and the damage wrought in our name; we just wanted to see giant monsters fight.

The genius of Godzilla Minus One, and it is a film of real genius, is that it allows us to see one of the most over-exposed characters in all of film in a new and revelatory way. 

It takes a monster who should, by all rights, be both exhausting and exhausted and makes him feel original and inspired. In a remarkable bit of alchemy, it turns a figure of fun into a figure of fright all over again. It makes a decidedly un-serious monster dead serious and scary as hell. If nothing else, this is easily one of the most terrifying PG-13 horror movies ever made. It comes close to single-handedly justifying PG-13 horror films as whole. 

Get ‘em big G!

And it did so by making a movie where the human element is as compelling and important as the part where Godzilla runs amuck and destroys cities. Like Jaws, Godzilla Minus One could probably get away with never actually showing its monster and still be a riveting, deeply satisfying exploration of a community in crisis. 

I liked 2017's Kong: Skull Island because it was essentially King Kong by way of Apocalypse Now. That’s a mash-up of two of my all-time favorite films. I similarly dug Godzilla Minus One because it's Godzilla by way of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, with some The Best Years of Our Lives thrown in for extra gravitas. 

Like The Master, Godzilla Minus One is about a deeply traumatized veteran of World War II who survived the carnage and bloodshed but is so emotionally shattered by his experiences that he still qualifies as a casualty of war. 

If you think this looks pretty fucking cool you’re right: it is pretty fucking cool.

Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a Kamikaze pilot who panicked under pressure and chose self-preservation over his duty to his country and its emperor in his ultimate moment of truth. Koichi’s struggle is consequently internal as well as external. He’s traumatized by everything he experienced in the war but also by his own failings and inadequacies. 

So when an ancient lizard God of vengeance materializes out of the ocean like a biblical plague it feels like the physical manifestation of his guilt and shame, the awful heaviness of living a life that is almost like suicide in giant monster form. 

I was astonished to learn that Godzilla Minus One cost under fifteen million dollars to make because it looks like it costs ten times as much. Godzilla is an absolute masterpiece of special effects, a being of pure fury and incandescent rage who has never been scarier.

For the Japanese people post World War II Godzilla marks a horrifying return to the almost inconceivable devastation it had just suffered through, when a single bomb killed tens of thousands of people and destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of others. 

Godzilla Minus One elevates the central metaphor of Godzilla as nuclear destruction in Kaiju form with its sensitive and nuanced portrayal of a post-war Japan nearly as destroyed by war as Shikishima himself. 

The pilot who was supposed to choose death but instead chose life makes a makeshift surrogate family out of Noriko Ōishi,(Minami Hamabe), a survivor whose parents died in the Bombing of Tokyo, and Akiko, a baby also orphaned by the raids. 

This particular skirmish is not in the film. Probably a deleted scene.

What these three suffering souls share is trauma and loss even before Godzilla enters the equation. Godzilla reminded me of Jaws in the judicious manner in which it employs its titular monster. Godzilla never threatens to wear out his welcome. 

Godzilla being onscreen is never anything less than exciting. When Japan’s most beloved import first appears my inner child squealed, “Oh my God! That is Godzilla! Holy shit is that awesome” while the serious, forty-seven year old me also squealed, “Oh my God! That is Godzilla! Holy shit is that awesome.”

Godzilla Minus One is probably the best Godzilla film I’ve ever seen because its version of Godzilla can’t be topped for ferocity. He's an absolute force of nature, the ultimate predator who has has chosen humanity as his hapless prey. 

But where Jaws doled out shots of its shark stingily in large part because a mechanical shark wasn’t working particularly well, so they had to shoot around it, every shot of Godzilla in action here is pure gold. I was thoroughly engaged through Godzilla Minus One’s one hundred and twenty five minutes but my heart rate jumped every time Godzilla was onscreen.

I loved Godzilla Minus One. I particularly liked the parts involving Godzilla. What a great character! I hope we haven’t seen the last of him.

Godzilla Minus One has just the right amount of Godzilla. It strikes the perfect balance. It delivers the goods on a spectacle and action level and then some but it also knows the power and potency of restraint, of holding back and not giving the audience too much of what they desperately crave. 

Pacing is another area where the film thrives. Godzilla’s attacks seem to always come at the exact right time. The character design is rooted in the classic conception of the character in 1954’s Godzilla, its overt inspiration, but in a way that doesn’t feel stodgy or stuck in the past.

Godzilla Minus One is an unusually satisfying visceral experience but what truly sets it apart and catapults it to the level of all-time greats is that it’s a wonderful emotional and intellectual journey as well. That can’t necessarily be said about other movies about giant monsters destroying Tokyo. 

Four and a half stars out of five