“I have a question. Does this plan of yours mean certain death?”
“Of course it doesn’t.”
“Okay, well, those odds are better than the war.”
So goes a conversation in Godzilla Minus One in which a naval commander attempts to persuade a room of Japanese men to volunteer for a mission to fight back against Godzilla, a monster mutated to gigantic proportions by radioactive discharge of H-Bombs tests in the Pacific Ocean in post-war Japan. It is an extraordinary scene given the historical context. The first notable detail is that the commander is requesting cooperation, not demanding compliance. Japan, and particularly imperial Japan, before and during the war, was extremely hierarchical. Not only did figures of authority demand complete obedience (infamously to the point of death), but the subjects usually obeyed without compunction. The second notable detail is that enough men actually agree to the mission, after, importantly, others do not without shame or consequence. This is right after defeat in World War II, a conflict whose damage to Japan and its people was exacerbated by the imperial leadership’s willingness to sacrifice its soldiers/pilots in suicide attacks and its people in bombing raids far beyond the point of any realistic hope of victory (and, of course, the American’s stunning capacity for ruthlessness in carrying out the same). These men aren’t agreeing to this dangerous mission simply because the authorities are expecting them to. They accept it on their own terms and, specifically, they aren’t willing to risk their lives for nothing. They insist on a plan that makes sense and has a chance to succeed. In one movie scene, you can feel Japanese culture feeling around for the middle ground between gung-ho aggression and total pacifism.
In the annals of human history, there are not many parallels to a society being so thoroughly laid low as Japan was in World War II. What exactly happened has rarely been directly addressed in the history of cinema, American or Japanese. One of the best war movies ever made, Grave of the Fireflies, showed a fire bombing raid, a mother covered head to toe in bandages dying from burns, a sister slowly starving to death. Thankfully, it was animated. The subject matter was so intense that it would have been very hard to watch if the medium itself wasn’t one removed from reality. Godzilla has always been a giant metaphor for nuclear war of course, but here he becomes more than that, a giant metaphor for war itself. How the characters react to Godzilla reveals their feelings toward war, the present one with Godzilla, yes, but also the one that has just devastated the country. In East Asian fashion, the people still pull their punches when it comes to criticizing their leaders, but the metaphor presents the opportunity to indirectly express these feelings, and the writing by Takashi Yamasaki (also the director) is exemplary in this regard. The main dramatic through is the character of Koichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot that either smartly and/or disgracefully did not complete a suicide mission during WWII, and how he seeks to redeem himself against Godzilla.
After seeing this movie (and being floored by how good it was), I looked up the original movies from 1954. An apt comparison of Godzilla Minus One is the first Daniel Craig era reboot of the James Bond franchise Casino Royale. A similar idea behind both being: what if we took this very popular pulp entertainment and rebooted it as a well-made and produced, dramatically competent, movie. Well, here it is. According to Wikipedia there are 38 other Godzilla movies. I’ve only seen five of them (1954, 1998, 2014, 2021, and 2024) but I would be very surprised if Godzilla Minus One isn’t the best one. This isn’t just a great monster movie. It’s one of the best movies of the year.
Godzilla himself is a fearsome monster. He has come a long way from a man in a suit knocking over skyscraper models. There is the iconic scene of crowds of people running away from him as he stomps through Tokyo. Godzilla’s heat ray is a straight up atomic blast that prompts an extraordinary scene of not just physical destruction but emotional devastation. The movie won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects and, somehow, this is a low-budget movie. Or at least relatively low, like 30 million dollars. I frankly don’t understand how that is possible, except to say that everyone else in the industry has much they can learn from it.
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