Godzilla Minus One
Written and Directed by Takashi Yamazaki
Starring Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Hidetaka Yoshioka
Rated PG-13 for creature violence and action
Runtime: 2 hrs, 5 minutes
In theaters

by Billy Russell, Staff Writer

1945: Japan is on the verge of surrendering. A kamikaze pilot (Kōichi Shikishima) takes his plane in to be serviced on a remote island yet-untouched by American island-hopping forces. That evening, they are attacked by a massive, dinosaur-like creature we know as Godzilla. Shikishima is ordered to slip into his plane and open fire on it with its large-caliber machine guns, but he freezes. He freezes and is paralyzed with fear and only he and one other person survive. The other survivor calls him a coward. When he returns home, his neighbors call him a coward, too, for being a kamikaze pilot to survive the war. His job, his mission, was to die. And he couldn’t even do that right.

Shikishima makes the acquaintance of Noriko Ōishi, a woman who has survived the American bombing campaign, but has seen her family and her previous life taken from her. Together, Shikishima and Noriko take care of Akiko, an infant whose parents died in the bombings. 

Shikishima is racked with guilt for surviving. He believes it was his destiny to die, and is afraid, nearly every waking day, that he died on that island when Godzilla attacked, and that everything else he’s experiencing is the dream (or hallucination) of a dead man. Noriko believes that they’re survived the war for a reason. And that’s, at its core, what Godzilla Minus Zero is about: It’s about the importance of life and cherishing it. Life has such amazing value, and it’s constantly being sacrificed in the name of war. In a post-war Japan, it was important for them to remember how much meaning their lives had, just by virtue of being alive. 

Every good Godzilla movie knows that a Godzilla movie is only as good as its human characters. If the drama in between citywide destruction is no good, the movie falls on its face. Without that emotional investment, there’s simply no reason to care. Carnage and mayhem by themselves are a boring thing. Godzilla Minus One understands this on a fundamental level and, more so than so many other movies of its type, wants to make sure that we care what happens. 

Take, for instance, a classic Godzilla gag: A train is running and Godzilla stops by and grabs the thing for a snack. He chomps on it and, from inside the train, we see his eye pressed up against the window. People scream. They fall. They die. In Godzilla Minus One, we see the classic train gag, but the difference now is that someone we know is onboard. Not just that, she’s not just a main character, or a plot device, she’s someone we’ve really gotten to know, intimately. And we don’t want to see her die. The train is now dangling over the city and falling from it means certain death? 

Oh, my god, I felt myself wondering. How is she going to get out of this?

This is what every filmmaker of every monster movie wants their audience to feel, but so few can actually achieve this level of investment, to squirm with anxiety in anticipation of what may happen next. It takes a lot of work to build the story and the characters up for this type of audience investment, but it’s even harder act to pull off to convince an audience that a main character may indeed perish in a run-of-the-mill action sequence that’s been with a 70-year-old franchise from the very beginning.

Now that’s good filmmaking.

The “Minus One” of the title is two-fold, referring to it, in some ways, being a prequel or reboot to the original film–negative one, going before the “zero” of the original. It also refers to the state of nothingness that Japan existed in after the war, ravaged by destruction, only to have another war on their hands, taking the country into a negative space.

Godzilla Minus One is on the more serious spectrum of the franchise, along with the original Godzilla and Shin Godzilla. It is also one of the best of the series, period. It’s massive in scale, intimate in story and there’s never a dull moment to be found. It’s thrilling, exhilarating and terrifying. It is also somber and sad in its quieter moments. It’s not just one of the best Godzilla movies, it’s one of the best movies of the year.

As the Apple TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters airs week after week, I want the makers of that series to watch Godzilla Minus One to see how to deftly balance human drama and a full-scale creature feature. Monarch stumbles again and again on its way to the finish line, with dreadful writing and unlikable characters. Worse yet, it’s dull–criminally dull, focused on building a cinematic universe with no clear vision at its center. It merely exists and tries to establish a mythos on the fly. 

It sometimes baffles me how bad American studios are at making Godzilla, but perhaps at the end of the day, it’s because it’s not America’s story to tell. Godzilla is such a uniquely Japanese metaphor, about seeing their country destroyed by mammoth, damn near Biblical forces. American versions of the story focus on the spectacle and the grandeur, but lack that emphasis on the horror of seeing the impossible come to life.

Godzilla and I go way back. It’s nice to see him back on the big screen with a story that knows how to handle him. His presence is treated with the appropriate amount of gravity and the parable presented, in a world today still ravaged by war and destruction, struggling to find meaning in the importance of human life, is just as relevant as ever. Godzilla Minus One is a masterpiece.