Godzilla Minus One is now streaming on Netflix.
Godzilla Minus One is a movie that’s even bigger than its title character. Director Takashi Yamazaki specializes in sweeping crowd-pleasers like this one, and Toho’s 33rd Godzilla picture (and the 37th in the series overall) is a blockbuster in every sense.
Although it was produced for a mere $15 million — less than 10% of the budget for Legendary’s last Monsterverse entry, Godzilla Vs. Kong — Godzilla Minus One looks expensive, making intelligent use of period sets and drone shots whooshing over wide stretches of ocean. Scenes of kaiju-fueled destruction similarly impress: A shot of a gigantic warship flying across the screen like a piece of kindling is worth seeing in IMAX all by itself.
Godzilla Minus One also has the stirring sentiment of an Independence Day movie, complete with rousing speeches. Here, however, the fervor is channeled away from any particular government (this is postwar Japan, after all – moral ambiguity abounds) and into rah-rah populism. The story revolves around an ex-kamikaze pilot, Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), whose encounter with Godzilla in the last days of World War II sets him on a path of vengeance and redemption.
We first meet Shikishima making an emergency landing on Odo Island in the summer of 1945. He claims his engine is malfunctioning, but mechanic Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) suspects the truth: That Shikishima is shirking his duty. Tachibana is sympathetic — why die for a lost cause? The war will be over soon anyway — but the two men have barely had time to commiserate when a T-Rex-like monster attacks the outpost, crushing makeshift buildings and swallowing soldiers whole.
Fast-forward two years, and Shikishima is living amid the rubble of postwar Tokyo with Noriko (Minami Hamabe), a woman he met in the aftermath of a firebomb attack, and their adopted daughter Akiko, to whom neither are related by blood but for whom both would give their lives. The influence of another iconic summer blockbuster – Steven Spielberg’s Jaws – comes into play when Shikishima takes a job as a minesweeper aboard a rickety wooden boat with a familiar crew of eccentrics: Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a.k.a. Doc; Seiji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), a.k.a. The Captain; and Shirō Mizushima (Yuki Yamada), a.k.a. The Kid.
The crew’s work puts them into contact with government secrets, both American and Japanese. In May 1947, they encounter the wreckage of a ship torn apart by a big, mean something in Tokyo Bay. That something turns out to be Godzilla, blown up to even more monstrous size by American nuclear testing in its South Pacific habitat. In a nod to Yamazaki’s favorite Godzilla movie – and an acknowledged influence on this one – Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, Godzilla returns as the embodiment of Japan’s war trauma and guilt, a metaphor that’s close to the surface here.
This theme is also reflected in one of Yamazaki’s innovations for the character of Godzilla: Here, the creature’s atomic breath explodes like an H-bomb on impact, producing a mushroom cloud and an enormous blast radius. Godzilla’s regenerative powers are emphasized as well, using visual effects – supervised by the director himself – that give the creature tactile texture as well as solid, animalistic weight.
Ironically, the one thing that’s smaller than usual in Godzilla Minus One is the king of the kaiju himself. Toho’s last live-action Godzilla movie, Shin Godzilla, introduced the biggest incarnation of Godzilla yet, standing 118.5 meters at full height. (He’s since been dwarfed by his anime counterpart, but that’s another story.) The monster we see here tops out at 50 meters – the height of the 1954 original, the closest analog to this Godzilla in timeline, if not in looks. (The actual design combines elements from the Heisei era of the ‘80s and ‘90s and Legendary’s more recent version of the creature.)
Godzilla Minus One is a film designed to make audiences stand up and cheer.
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As with many Godzilla movies, there could be more Godzilla in Minus One. Instead, the focus is on character development – namely, Shikishima’s arc from wartime coward to kaiju-fighting hero and family man. The film only sags a bit in the middle, between Godzilla-driven set pieces, and overall the mood is much more hopeful than in the cynical Shin Godzilla. There’s more swell, in the score and on the heart strings; there’s less terror and more pride, even (or perhaps especially) while evoking a vulnerable period in Japan’s history. This is a film designed to make audiences stand up and cheer – and when Akira Ifukube’s Godzilla theme kicks in, it’s difficult not to comply.
