GODZILLA MINUS ONE REVIEW

 

Godzilla Minus One Review (No Spoilers)

 

Godzilla is back…again! 2023 will go down in history as one of the best years for fans of the franchise. Unlike Marvel fans who are slowly dropping off due to oversaturation and declining quality, it seems Godzilla is amassing more fans than ever before. When I first started my blog in late 2013, one of the first big events I built up to was the release of 2014’s American Godzilla reboot—the first Hollywood Godzilla production since 1998, and the first overall Godzilla film in ten years. Since then I have written about Godzilla on numerous occasions, always eagerly anticipating the next movie or show to write about. For the first time in seven years, an authentic, live-action Toho-produced Godzilla movie has come out, but unlike the last one, Shin Godzilla, which received a very limited international theatrical release, people are going to the theater in huge numbers to see Godzilla Minus One and are absolutely raving about it.

Enough preamble. Let me get right to it. Godzilla Minus One is a masterpiece. I’ve enjoyed all three of the Monsterverse Godzilla films made by Hollywood so far, but none of them can hold a candle to this one. Only the filmmakers from the country that birthed the king of the monsters seem to be able to make anything that rivals the original 1954 film as the new best entry in the long-running series. Some fans are calling Godzilla Minus One the best Godzilla movie of all-time. I disagree, but I understand why that’s the discussion being had by many, because it is just that good.

Like 2016’s Shin Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One ignores all previous films and starts completely from scratch, which all Godzilla reboots did not do before Shin Godzilla, they always were sequels to the 1954 original, which was (and still is) regarded as one of the most important giant monster movies in history. Godzilla Minus One starts out at the end of WWII, with a Kamikaze pilot named Koichi Shikishima fleeing the war and landing his plane on Odo Island (the island being a nod to where Godzilla first shows up in the 1954 original). From there Koichi’s experiences represent the “minus” part of the title: the advertisements remind us that “after the war, Japan had lost everything, from zero to minus” but he finds some hope when he takes in a woman and an orphaned girl, then gets a job as a minesweeper. It’s not long after that Godzilla rears his giant, ugly head, and Koichi has to protect his family, as well as help the citizens of Japan try to stop the monster.

The version of Godzilla in Minus One is a pure villain. This Godzilla is an uncompromising nightmare that looks more like the traditional old-school design, but has an aggressive and malicious quality I haven’t seen since 1984’s The Return of Godzilla. The new American Monsterverse Godzilla has been mostly a good guy, and even in Godzilla vs. Kong, which had him playing the antagonistic monster, he was still secretly a good guy the whole time because all he was really trying to do was stop the idiots who were building Mechagodzilla and remind Kong that he is the alpha on planet earth. Heroic Godzilla is fun, but the reason Toho usually reboots this series with a serious take is it does get silly eventually (which is a path the Monsterverse might be on now). Minus One’s new Godzilla is interesting in that he doesn’t represent quite the same atomic metaphor as the original, nor is he a vessel for political commentary or more modern disasters like Shin Godzilla was, but he is still a monster made even more monstrous by atomic radiation and poses a threat to all of Japan, as well as the main characters of the film in some specific ways.

Godzilla 2014 made the admiral effort of being a character-focused story with the monsters supporting the narrative. Yet again, leave it to Toho to perfect this kind of monster movie. No one should be complaining about boring, unsympathetic characters or cutting away from the monster action this time. I really liked Shin Godzilla, but in the years since, I find I appreciate the experience of watching certain scenes from it and the ideas in it more than anything. The destruction, the reintroduction of Godzilla as a new mutating force of nature, and the clear inspiration of the 2011 Fukushima tsunami disaster were all expertly done, but the story was very calculating and the people in it feel part of a real government, but not exactly like sympathetic characters, more like stand-ins for making the situation feel real despite being totally outlandish. Godzilla Minus One resonated with me more, largely because the story was about characters who felt like real, relatable people with a more personal connection to the monster. In terms of telling a serious, human story, Godzilla Minus One absolutely nails it.  

Without spoiling anything too much, the first time Godzilla is shown is a real surprise, and harkens back again to the Heisei Era Godzilla films from the 80s/90s. The inspirations for Takashi Yamazaki, who directed, wrote, and designed the visual effects, clearly included the 1954 original, but also include a couple of my favourite films from one of the most famous American directors of all-time: Steven Spielberg. This is not the first time Spielberg has inspired or been referenced by a Japanese Godzilla director, but the opening scene and the scene of Godzilla chasing the minesweeper boat very clearly took some notes from Jurassic Park and Jaws. To be clear, it’s not a criticism, and I think these North American influences are partly what has helped audiences over here connect more to Godzilla Minus One than seemingly any Japanese Godzilla movie before it. Shin Godzilla did something quite different with the monster and was definitely weird in some ways, but I think it was a little too different for mainstream audiences. Despite being in Japanese and not having any American actors, the human drama in this one is so good it has achieved what no other Godzilla movie has been able to, in terms of transcending being just a monster movie.

So far I’ve had nothing but good things to say about Godzilla Minus One, so you might be wondering why I don’t think it’s the best Godzilla movie ever. The music was really good, and I loved the blending of new themes with the classic Godzilla March, but I don’t think the score overall was quite as epic as the score for Shin Godzilla. I will say I preferred the sound mixing in this one over Shin Godzilla, though. I thought it was interesting that Shin recycled some of the Akira Ifukube score from the 1954 original, but it was in mono. I would’ve preferred re-recorded tracks. Godzilla’s roar in Shin was likewise recycled and sounded exactly the same as it did in 1954, but Minus One remixed the original roar sound effect to make it even scarier and completely fill the theater while still being recognizably the same. It gave me actual chills at one point.

The acting was good (even the overacting) and the cinematography was excellent, with some of the best day-time shots of Godzilla ever captured. The visual effects were even better than I expected—much more consistent than Shin Godzilla, really showing how far CGI has come even since then and making me miss the old suitmation method a little less. There’s been a lot of discussion about how the movie only had a fifteen million dollar budget (when adjusted for currency differences) but that number has gained traction as being true in spite of being inaccurate. From what the director has said, it sounds like the budget was actually even lower, but whatever the final cost, it shows how hundreds of millions of dollars are not needed to create realistic, high-quality visual effects, and they are still no substitute for a good story and good characters. Sure, not every shot of Godzilla or the destruction looks perfect, but there never has been (and probably never will be) a monster movie with perfect visual effects.

After all that budget and effects talk, I have to say the details in everything were exquisite, so visually I had no issues, but story-wise and character-wise, there were a few things I thought could have been a bit better. Seeing post-war Japan and the emergence of Godzilla from a more civilian-centered perspective was a nice change, and the scenes with just the characters were more than compelling in the first half. Godzilla’s attack on Ginza was the action-packed centerpiece of the film and felt like a true modern update on the 1954 original’s equivalent of this part of the story. But, after Big G’s devastating attack, we get the usual board room scene of the characters figuring out how to defeat the monster. I love these kinds of scenes; they’re a staple of any Godzilla movie, really, and the plan they concoct to take him down is actually original, understandable, and easy enough to buy into, especially compared to Shin Godzilla’s far more ridiculous plan. But, the pacing drags after this scene, and it felt a bit too long and too slow leading up to the finale.

When I thought back on the 1954 film, which I re-watched just recently in preparation for Minus One, I recalled how sparse and precise the exposition was that followed Godzilla’s big attack on Tokyo. Even though Minus One is only two hours and the character-focused scenes aren’t bad, it still felt a bit too long in the second half. I’m also unsure of how to feel about the ending. I won’t spoil it, but I’ve seen some fans who love the ending and some who thought the movie should have ended ten minutes earlier, and I’m somewhat mixed. I’ll have to see it again to decide. Even though I’ve talked about the movie from beginning to end and covered almost everything, I have to come back to Godzilla himself once more. Whether he’s a good guy or bad guy or anti-hero or ambivalent force, the spectacle of seeing a giant monster destroy a city is the selling point. For perhaps the first time since the original, I was not primarily excited to see Godzilla show up after his first appearance, I was unnerved.

People don’t look at Godzilla as a horror movie series anymore, because it’s diverged into the science fiction genre far more often, and isn’t usually played up as all that scary the majority of the time, but rather leans into the action more, with Godzilla fighting other monsters. The 1954 original is a horror movie, and Shin Godzilla went back to the anxiety and fear-inducing intentions of the original, but Godzilla Minus One managed to make Godzilla scary again in a way that’s closer to how scary he was in the original. Any time Godzilla uses his atomic breath, it is absolutely devastating, both literally and emotionally. The shots of Godzilla, though sparse, are all impactful, and we also see him from angles and in ways we haven’t before. There are no other monsters for him to fight, and I didn’t miss that one bit. I felt a real sense of dread leading up to the Ginza attack and the final battle, and I can only compare it to the first time I saw Godzilla 2000 and had never seen a Godzilla movie before, or when I saw the 1954 original for the first time and cowered under the blankets as Tokyo prepared for a battle they could not win.

I’m not sure I need to say much more at this point, other than Godzilla Minus One lived up to my high expectations, and as someone who has seen every Godzilla movie and knows them all inside and out, it was pretty incredible to see the 37^th overall Godzilla movie and feel like it was something new. It is also accessible for those who are not of the same level of fandom as myself while still satisfying those who have been fans all their lives. Hollywood, please, take notes. While it might not be my personal new favourite Godzilla movie, there’s a strong case to make for it being the best since the original, even in comparison to some of the other all-time best ones. Godzilla can be many things, but it’s pretty special for it to now be something people are talking about so positively and taking seriously. Godzilla has always been more than just a monster movie, and Minus One is being recognized as such to a degree no other movie in the franchise has been in seventy years. If you can see it while it’s still in theaters, I highly recommend you do so.