(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s a rare monster movie indeed that leaves you feeling that you’ve been through the emotional mill.
Most times these big scary blockbusters go hard on the epic scenes and the awe-inspiring special effects and leave any effect on audience members sitting purely in the shock and awe space; that’s fine, of course, since these movies are generally positioned at nothing more than escapist, popcorn-chomping action flicks with no real lasting effect beyond having to pick your jaw back up off the floor.
But sometimes, just sometimes, a monster film comes along that not only gets its epic action on but also takes the time to tell an engagingly immersive and thoughtful story and in so doing, serves up characters that are a welcome far cry from the usual wind-prone cardboard cutout characters that populate, and of course, run screaming with melodramatic vivacity, in these films.
Godzilla Minus One (Gojira Mainasu Wan), released in 2023 and written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is one such departure from the monster film norm, and it doesn’t edge away from being one of the blockbuster pack, it fairly bolts, giving us a film that has its monster moments sure, but also a story that is the equal of anything you would find in a robustly indie, Oscar-worthy drama.
You get a strong sense that Godzilla Minus One is going to head in that direction in the very first scene when a kamikaze pilot named Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lands on Odo Island in the closing days of World War Two, feigning mechanical difficulties after he finds himself unable to complete his suicide mission.
The head mechanic on the island, Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), wises up to Shikishima almost immediately but demonstrates empathy for his position, acknowledging that the war has reached a point where self sacrifice of the kind demanded of kamikaze pilots like the man before him is all but pointless.
His magnanimous attitude takes a traumatic beating though when Godzilla, pre-irradiated gigantism, but still terrifyingly big for all that, wanders ashore and kills everyone but Tachibana and Shikishima, the latter of whom fails to fire his plane’s guns into Godzilla when ordered to do so.
Later events show that firing off the guns would have done little, but still Shikishima returns to Tokyo a broken man, haunted not just by his failure to do his duty but by Tachibana’s excoriation of him; his despairing frame of mind only grows more soul destroying when he arrives home to find everyone he ever loved dead in air raids.
The only bright spot is his meeting with a woman named Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) who is carrying her dead friend’s daughter Akiko (Everdeen Angeles) and who, along with Shikishima’s new gig on a mine detection ship, the Shinsei Maru, with crewmembers Yōji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) and Shirō Mizushima (Yuki Yamada), give is life some purpose and a reason to go on.
But no matter how well his post-war life progresses, and its clear that he loves Noriko and she loves him (though he cannot admit that, so emotionally shut down is he) and that he and his crew members are now family, not just friends, he remains lost in what happened to him during the war, admitting that, for him, the war is far from over.
That’s where the expositional spoilers must end but suffice to say, the care and attention to detail that Yamazaki takes in his narrative structuring, character expression and world-building in a shell-shocked, rubble-strewn post-war Japan elevates Godzilla Minus One, the 37th film in the Godzilla franchise, far beyond the usual light-and-fast monster epic.
Sure, you get lots of Godzilla stomping destructively through the ocean and in a newly rebuilt Tokyo, and it looks impressive as hell, but all of that monstery action is purely in service to telling the story of a man, and indeed a country, who has suffered greatly for his country’s now-soundly vanquished imperial ambitions.
Godzilla Minus One is a dramatic film first and a monster flick second and it works brilliantly well, telling a harrowing tale of survivor guilt and eventual hard-won redemption, while also commenting as all Godzilla films to a greater or lesser extent, on the folly and hell of war.
It’s a salient topic in our current age where two major, and a host of minor but no less destructive, conflagrations, are emphasising once again that no one truly wins from war and that the end result is a wholesale savaging of lives, society, and the environment, the poster monster for which is, of course, Godzilla.
While Godzilla Minus One does get a little overwrought at times, both in terms of performances and messaging – which is as blunt as it gets though not completely ineffective; though to be fair, Shikishima’s story could’ve done all the futility and horrors of war heavy lifting that was needed – it is, overall, a masterful film that stands head and shoulders over many other films in its own franchise and the monster/disaster film genre overall.
While the action scenes with Godzilla, who is as broken and changed by the war and its aftereffects including all that nuclear testing, as anyone on land, are searingly memorable, what really stays with you long after the credits have rolled is the profound sense of having witnessed one man’s stuttering and agonised journeying from brokenness to wholeness again.
Shikishima, who is brought to deeply moving life, and almost death, by Kamiki, a onetime child actor with 25 years experience in the industry, is a everyman par excellence, representing the distress and soul-crushing sadness of a nation whose thwarted militaristic ambitions have left it a shell of its former self.
He is a simply superb protagonist, and along with exceptionally affecting and thoughtful storytelling and a cast of fully-formed and heartfelt characters who struggle to escape their collective pain, he elevates Godzilla Minus One into something truly special, a film that gives us monster thrills, yes, but in the context of some deep, probing humanity which leaves you truly and irrevocably moved in a way that few other films in this genre ever manage.