Going into his 70th anniversary, Godzilla has had quite a decade: multiple animated films, a stunningly good run of comics from IDW Publishing and a popular ride in Tokyo, and three largely well-received Hollywood co-productions, with a fourth in the wings for 2024. Not to mention the ongoing Apple-produced streaming series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which defies the odds by being surprisingly good, or Hideaki Anno’s visionary Shin Godzilla, the only other live-action production from Toho Studios in the past 20 years and one of the greatest entries in the series. It’s a good time to be King of the Monsters, and Godzilla Minus One is a pretty stellar launching pad into his next era, blending classic elements with an intense, well-conceived human perspective that gives the film a unique character all its own.
Godzilla stories have generally been set in either the present day or far-flung future. Minus One upends convention by seeing its tale in 1947, only a year and change after the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki chose the setting, and the title, to depict a decimated country without any military capabilities whatsoever, reliant entirely on a generation of civilian men and women still recovering from the wars and political turbulence that defined their society for a decade-and-a-half prior. The emergence of Godzilla in this environment means setting the clock back before even Year Zero of their recovery.
It’s a smart creative choice and the right move to make after Shin Godzilla, which made modifications to the character’s nature to account for society’s 21st-century capabilities. Shin presented the largest Godzilla ever; no longer an allegory for nuclear armaments, he became symbolic of a society that chose to play god with nuclear power and a country rife with bureaucratic decay that made it nigh-impossible to combat.
The time period doesn’t mean Minus One is a remake of the original Gojira; it’s actually just as indebted to Shusuke Kaneko’s 2001 film Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, an influence Yamazaki has apparently admitted. In that film, Godzilla doesn’t just represent the destruction wrought on Japan by the atomic bomb (or the variety of other, broader themes given to the character in the years since – none of which really work as well). There, he represents the forgotten souls of the war and the atrocities committed by both Japan and other powers alike. In that film, he becomes a cross-generational allegory, a reminder of the war in its totality after generations simmered in history.
Minus One mines similar territory, through the eyes of one character and the people in his orbit.
The story follows Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who fled his duty to die by claiming mechanical problems with his aircraft. He lands on Odo Island for “repairs,” a fateful decision that leads him to encounter Godzilla, a creature known to the local islanders, and Kōichi is one of the sole survivors. Soon after, the war ends and Kōichi is sent back to Tokyo, where he learns his family was killed in the American fire bombings. Although he quickly forges a found family with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and Akiko (Sae Nagatani), a woman and her adopted child, Kōichi can’t shake the compounding survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his time at war. Although he loves his partner and surrogate child, Kōichi can’t let them into his life. He can’t leave the war behind.
Unlike most Godzilla films, which feature varying types of human stories – which I wrote about in my review of Monarch – Minus One is the first one to really make Godzilla himself feel like the supporting character for a specific character’s story arc. The focus for most of the film is squarely on Kōichi and his pain. The supporting cast – including the film’s resident scientist, Kenji (Hidetaka Yoshioka) – are all part of Kōichi’s story rather than characters leading their own lives or conflicts with Godzilla. It’s not that Godzilla films have never had main characters or emotional through-lines, but none has ever gone quite this far or so intimately followed a specific character’s journey. Godzilla is the war, and Godzilla isn’t ready to let Kōichi go, either.
It’s all fertile and compelling ground for a new story featuring Godzilla, and for the most part, the film is successful at mining all the potential therein. Kōichi’s relationship with Noriko and Akiko is deep and effective, the two of them also surviving the deaths of their respective families during the war. I’ll admit: As a parent of small children, Akiko’s presence hit me where it hurts. She’s never put in artificial danger to raise stakes. Instead, the responsibility Kōichi feels toward her seamlessly accomplishes all of that work.
If you aren’t concerned about depth or character in your Godzilla films, well, there’s still plenty of Godzilla action to wet your whistle. The film takes conflicts between humans and Godzilla in a different direction by setting most of the action at sea, embracing the monster’s amphibious origins in a way generally untapped across his 70 years of wrecking shit. This makes for the best action in the film, especially the first major encounter with him, which I will definitely show my Godzilla-obsessed 4-year-old son once it shows up on YouTube. (The rest of the movie will wait until he’s old enough, as it would upset him now.)
Godzilla also smashes the Ginza district of Tokyo, which makes for some good city-smashing. But here’s the thing: despite the best special effects in a Toho movie, the film’s version of Godzilla feels static at times and strangely immobile. This was the case in Shin Godzilla, too, and I’m not quite sure why. Is it a budget thing? An aesthetic choice? I have a hard time imagining it’s solely the latter given the major differences between Anno and Yamazaki’s approaches to the character, but then again the “why” doesn’t matter. It looks strange and makes for sequences that aren’t quite as visceral as they could be. Say what you will about suitmation, but the limitations of filming men wearing rubber costumes meant creatively filming around them to create the illusion of size and terror. Here, there are quite a few sequences where all I felt was, “Yep, that’s a pretty cool rendering of Godzilla standing there.”
Still, a pretty cool rendering of Godzilla counts for a lot, and at least composer Naoki Satō knows when to drop the character’s classic themes by Akira Ifukube. The American films have had a serious love-hate relationship with the audio motifs that are so integral to Godzilla, and I’m glad Toho has maintained them. They’re not the entirety of the soundtrack, however, and Satō deserves credit for his own score, which is much more modern in composition but blends well with the older material. I had to laugh, however; there’s a sequence that feels decidedly similar to Dunkirk in the later part of the film, and in that moment Satō’s score also feels directly inspired by Nolan’s film, too.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t celebrate the way Satō drops the classic Islander theme from King Kong vs. Godzilla, a total banger criminally left absent from the recent Godzilla vs. Kong.
Shin Godzilla famously ended with a tease at a potential sequel that never came. No matter. That film didn’t need a sequel. It felt like a statement beyond simple IP management for Toho Studios. I’d say the same for Minus One, which leaves an open door to a sequel I don’t ever need to see. The emphasis on Kōichi’s story might put off some audiences who are only watching in hopes of big-monster action and nothing more. But as a fan of the franchise, I’m fairly over the moon with what Yamazaki has accomplished. I can’t wait to watch it again.