Seated next to a delightfully dorky family during Alamo Drafthouse’s preshow for Godzilla Minus One, I was privy to a debate between father and sons as to which kaiju battle was least satisfying. Ebirah, who looks like a crawdad on nuclear steroids, was the recipient of some serious shade. Then we all watched what was essentially a two-hour meditation on PTSD, systemic governmental failures, and the moral responsibility of individual citizens to confront global threats.
Monster movies contain multitudes, y’all. They are goofy melodramas that somehow stand as noble metaphors precisely because of their oversized obviousness. They are often impressively ambitious in their cinematic carnage and frequently miss their special effect target in a way that feels purposeful. It’s as if they’re reassuring audiences that this specific horror, involving freakishly mutated beasts, isn’t real while pointing at inescapable terrors that plague our actual lives.
Sorry, Minus One kinda messed me up. In a good way!
Because without ruining anything, the general thesis of the 37th big-screen Godzilla appearance is palpably optimistic. At a time when faith in institutions is at an all-time low, when longing for death is frequent fodder for memes and jokes, Minus One says living is good and that we should have faith in each other. All military-adjacent blockbusters should be so kind and thoughtful, ain’t that right, Maverick?
Set at the lizard tail-end of WWII, writer/director Takashi Yamazaki’s epic follows a kamikaze pilot named Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) who opts not to kamikaze. Instead, he fakes plane troubles and lands on an island for “repairs.” Shortly after the head mechanic, Sosaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), and his crew determine the aircraft is A-Ok, a smaller Godzilla shows up. Tachibana pleads with Shikishima to sacrifice himself to save the others, but the pilot once again does the math and realizes that his death would be senseless and useless. The two men are the only ones who survive.
Shikishima returns to find his home obliterated by American bombs and meets a young woman, Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe), caring for a baby given to her by a nameless mother who died during an air raid. Over the next few years, the makeshift family survives and starts to thrive, even if Shikishima can’t seem to overcome his cowardice and trauma. Then Godzilla returns, having been plumped to gargantuan by radiation. What follows is the expected tale of disaster, survival, and redemption, with a twist.
That twist is the aforementioned lecturing about the sanctity of life and the power inherent in average people. The atomic breath of Godzilla is a blank canvas upon which any massive real-world calamity can be projected. If it was once a literal warning about nuclear armament, it now easily works as climate change analogy. The idea here being that we have to work against the hopelessness rightly felt at the ineptitude and malevolence of certain leaders and find our way to a collective response that keeps hope (and us) alive.
Reactions to Minus One have both overhyped and mocked the effects. They are sometimes breathtaking. They are also sometimes preposterously silly. That is the duality of the kaiju, the complexity of these creature features. It’s fine if it isn’t your cup of sake, but it is firmly in line with the 70-year history of this specific subgenre. As is the broadly acted melodrama, filled with on-the-nose dialogue and over-the-top emoting. If those elements make you check out, that’s fine, but know that you’re missing something special.
Grade = A-
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Kambole Campbell at Empire Magazine says “As with Shin Godzilla before it, it’s delightful to see a monster film that is equally as interested in creating a specific mood with its effects-work — rather than just effects for effects’ sake.”
Kimberly Terasaki at The Mary Sue says “the film does not frame an unwillingness to die as weakness or cowardice. Instead, it reflects on the value of life when a community is dealing with tragedy after tragedy, aggravated by an apathetic government.”
John Nguyen at Nerd Reactor says “What makes Godzilla Minus One exceptional is that if the director removed Godzilla from the film, the human story still holds up, making it one of the best human stories in a Godzilla film by far.”