While I cannot say for certain that I have seen every single film ever made featuring that most celebrated of kaiju, Godzilla, I have seen enough of them to be able to tell the difference between the ones that have been made with a genuine sense of ambition, such as the ground-breaking original 1954 Japanese film and and the often-brilliant 2016 revamp Shin Godzilla (a.k.a. Godzilla vs. Bureaucracy) and those that have been slapped together, sometimes seemingly at random, by people who are only interested in exploiting studio IP than in creating a reasonably exciting or at least amusingly campy movie. As a result, I can tell you with reasonable certainty that Godzilla Minus One, writer-director Yamazaki Takashi’s film developed to mark the 70th anniversary of the original’s release, is one of the very best of the bunch—a full-on epic that contains all the wild destruction imaginable from such a thing as well as a story and characters that are given far more development than one might rightly expect.
As the film opens, it is the waning days of WWII and Japanese kamikaze pilot Koichi (Kamiki Ryunosuke) fakes troubles with his plane in order to avoid his self-destructive duty. His ruse is quickly discovered by the mechanics on the small island where he lands but before anything can be done, the island is attacked by an enormous reptile (guess who) who kills off most of the others while Koichi, who has once again frozen in panic, hides and watches. After returning home to his bombed-out village, he winds up joining forces with the homeless Noriko (Hamabe Minami) and the abandoned child, Akiko (Nagasaki Sae), that she is caring for. Over the next few years, the three form a makeshift family while Koichi gets a job as part of a crew removing mines left in the nearby waters by American and Imperial forces. However, Koichi is still haunted by his past cowardice and it comes back to haunt him literally when that same reptile, now quadrupled in size by atomic testing and virtually indestructible, turns up again and begins heading towards Tokyo. With the country’s military still decimated and the Americans unwilling to help, a bold scientist comes up with a plan that will hopefully bring the beast down and, perhaps inevitably, Koichi is a key element. Will he finally put the past behind him or will he chicken out again and let the entire country fall due to his cowardice?
Granted, this does not sound manifestly different from most Godzilla movies I suppose, but what it may lack in ingenuity, it more than makes up for in its execution. As was the case with the very first film, Godzilla Minus One does a good job using the creature as a way of exploring the mixture of shock, shame and resolve felt by the people of Japan in the immediate aftermath of the war and the beginning of the atomic age that found them literally at ground zero. Unlike most films of this sort, the main human characters are given recognizable emotions and personalities so that we actually root for them to survive instead of merely being squashed. (The performance by Ryunosuke is particularly good in this regard.)
That said, my guess is that most of you are probably more interested in the quality of the on-screen carnage and in that regard, the film is an absolute knockout. Godzilla himself is an impressively scaly behemoth that lacks any of the overtly cutesy touches that have been instilled upon him over the years. The action beats are spectacular throughout with two particular sequences—an inspired Jaws homage in which Koichi and his fellow crew members on their rickety wooden boat find themselves being pursued by Godzilla and a scene in which he lays waste to Ginza—having been designed and staged with such ingenuity and excitement that they beat pretty much every mega-budget would-be action blockbuster at their own game and at a fraction of the cost. (I have read this film cost $15 million and it gives an incredible amount of bang for the relatively minuscule bucks involved.)
In the last couple of weeks, I have seen a number of the big ticket award-bait movies on the horizon and I must confess that a number of them have frankly left me a little cold. Because of this, some may conclude that I have elected to be especially forgiving of Godzilla Minus One because it lacks the overweening pretensions of those misfired efforts. Trust me, if I had seen this film right after the one-two punch of Barbie and Oppenheimer this past summer, I would still be raving about it because it really is that good. It is, in fact, the kind of monster movie that you always dreamed of seeing as a kid (or even as an adult) but rarely ever got—one so good that even those who would do anything rather than watch an ordinary film of this sort will find themselves getting swept up in the excitement of it all. Hell, even when it gets around to the final shot that suggests that perhaps (Spoiler Alert) the ending is not quite as cut-and-dried as we have been led to believe, not only will you not resent the obvious sequel set-up, you may find yourself beginning to eagerly await the day when the follow up eventually appears.