★★★

Godzilla Minus One poses a threat of sorts to Hollywood.  America may not fear Japanese business the way it used to, but Hollywood’s creative business of wasting 3x the money to make movies that today look 3x worse than they did 20 years ago has created a vacuum that has long deserved an international challenger.  With Godzilla Minus One (and Shin Godzilla before it), Japan has risen from the ocean to meet it.

It should not surprise anyone that Godzilla Minus One is good.  But it is minus one from the greatness of certain others.  Toho Studios understands that as fun as it is to recreate the wreckage and destruction of cities as a kind of testing of the latest update in effects and CG technology, the “plot” has been somewhat lost over the years.  You won’t find anywhere in All Monsters Attack (1969) anything that resembles the recognition of awesome, unstoppable godlike terror that made the first film such a turning point in cinema. Whereas Shin Godzilla satirized political and bureaucratic responses to modern disasters and updated the monster to fit the theme, Godzilla Minus One returns to 1945 and the years that immediately followed.  Director Takashi Yamazaki has a flair for the general look of the period, including what films and footage of the era looked like.  But sometimes the limitation of the budget is obvious, such as the use of crowded rooms, wooden boats, and a two-room house for much of the drama.  Godzilla himself is a bit clunkier than other films have made him, especially when he’s arming his mouth.

In fact, the entire opening sequence feels like a neglected rough draft for the rest of the film.  When protagonist Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) cannot open fire on Godzilla in their initial encounter, his thoughts on the matter are not clarified by sound filmmaking techniques.  Is he simply scared?  Does he believe the monster is unkillable?  Does he not believe he has a good shot?  Does he think he won’t get off enough to stop him?  Or has he simply given up and is looking for an excuse to avoid confronting him, thinking of which one will be accepted by his peers later?  Any of these theories are plausible, and the film suffers from a missed emotional opportunity by not giving the decision personal weight.

It is a hollow, trite moment when Shikishima says: “I would like to try to live again.”  As if this mere platitude against kamikaze-ism can propel it forward.  However, what does propel the theme forward is the attention to family, collegiality, and workmanship on the ground, or, in this case, at sea level.  Nothing in Godzilla Minus One rivals the singing of “Gondola No Uta” in Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) – a far better, more poignant film about finding meaning to life when everything around you is broken.  But we see the survivor’s guilt blind Shikishima to the gifts of life around him.  And we see a picture that never feels like a mixed message in telling us that even when living is dangerous and prone to constant threats of terror and destruction, life is still worth it all while Godzilla makes ships disappear, splits train cars like a KitKat, and tailwhips buildings at their foundation like a hatchet to a stool leg.

Ironically, Godzilla Minus One suggests, perhaps carelessly, how westernized the country of Japan became after fire and nuclear fallout turned everything that had existed before to ash and rubble.  Godzilla himself is a kind of mass accelerant for a kind of democratic, civic mobilization that Americans might recognize better than others would.  The original Godzilla used the characters on the science team to morally reconcile the giant leap into the new world brought by the bomb and the inevitable fascination with its effects, and in doing so updated human language in recognition of the psychological impact of those mushroom clouds and the sight of hundreds of hospital beds packed with radiation sickness like mass graves for the alive.  Again, Godzilla Minus One is… a “minus one” because its focus is smaller without the enhancement of feeling.  When a twist occurs in the final action sequence, it plays out like a rehash of Dunkirk without understanding of how that film made the moment work, used here merely to drag out the stakes before everything goes silent.

Nevertheless, in taking its pieces and putting them forward coherently, Godzilla Minus One succeeds.  It avoids the constant shouting “here’s what we are doing now” dialogue that made The Wandering Earth tedious, and the sight of people coming together as citizens, with a new yet carefully re-aligned interest in their military, in a volunteered manner to get the uplift and catharsis that their government kept promising to give them by the war, is ultimately satisfying.  The abundance of remake energy in Godzilla Minus One is employed effectively to affirm Yamazaki’s populist themes, and – like a one-shot comic book issue that awkwardly steps in, updates the character, and then rudely slams the door shut on its way out, the film has the right answer in mind and doesn’t shy away from telling you what it is.

The Hollywood blockbuster has been dead since Avengers: Endgame.  Tom Cruise salvaged what he could from it for Top Gun: Maverick, but even the anticipated lists of forthcoming money sequels often have more numbers and subheadings than thought.  Even the parallel American Kaiju franchise has turned into more of an overly busy cartoon than it needed to after the majesty of Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla (2014) masterpiece, but in fairness – this is the type of effects movie we should be seeing all the time.  Good art is worth dying for, and Japan’s Toho Studios has with Godzilla Minus One made something to appreciate.

– Vivek