The Movie That Humiliated Hollywood: A Review of Godzilla: Minus One

 directed by Takashi Yamazaki

written by Yamazaki, Ishiro Honda and Takeo Murata

Last year, Hollywood's cookie-cutter, conveyor-belt approach to making movies blew up in its face in the worst way possible, with a majority of its major, big-budget releases tanking at the box-office nearly all year round. No one was safe, whether it was the once almighty Disney, whose flops included a Marvel movie, an original animated movie and an Indiana Jones movie, or even Tom Cruise, whose Mission Impossible movie managed to underperform at the box office even after he had dragged it to completion during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

It was against the backdrop of these creative and financial disasters, that Godzilla: Minus One, a low-budget, entirely Japanese-produced disaster movie starring the iconic kaiju, opened to nearly universal critical acclaim and global box-office glory, taking nearly everyone by surprise, arguably including the filmmakers.

Godzilla: Minus One takes place immediately after the Second World War has flattened Japan. During the dying days of the war, a failed kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryonosuku Kamiki) lands on a secluded island populated by mechanics, asking them to attend to his plane. The lead mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) realizes that Shikishima is a deserter, but before anything else happens the small island is invaded by a gigantic creature known to the locals as Godzilla. The creature kills everyone on the island except for Shikishima and Tachibana, whom it leaves for dead.

Shikishima returns to the mainland to find his home completely destroyed, and as he struggles to rebuild, he finds himself starting a rather unusual family with the drifter Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and an abandoned baby she has adopted. Shikishima finds well-paying work as a minesweeper, shooting mines with pinpoint accuracy from a small boat, and all seems to be going well for him. Even as the Americans conduct nuclear testing in the nearby seas in Bikini Atoll, Japan strives to rebuild.

Then, to everyone's shock, Godzilla reappears on the mainland, only this time it has grown much, much bigger as a result of the nuclear detonations. The gigantic creature leaves wide swaths of destruction in its wake, and soon the people of Japan find themselves in a race against time to figure out how to stop it from flattening what's left of their country. After suffering another unthinkable loss, Shikishima volunteers to lead the charge, together with his minesweeping crewmates, Captain Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki) Engineer Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) and Crewman Mizushima (Yuki Yamada).  Noda and other volunteers come up with a daring plan to take down Godzilla once and for all, but it also requires someone to act as bait for the monster by piloting an airplane, a job for which Shikishima is eminently qualified. There's only one mechanic he will trust to help him prepare his plane, though: Tachibana.  The stage is set, and Shikishima and his allies make one final, valiant stand against the seemingly invincible creature known only as Godzilla.  

The makers of this film get right virtually everything that the 2014 American film, directed by Gareth Edwards, got completely wrong. First and foremost, they created characters with whom the audience could connect and identify. While Shikishima's deep trauma and survivor's guilt are front and center, it's clear that everyone else in the supporting cast carries some version of that pain considering the state of their country, and when they express anguish upon realizing what they are facing their despair is palpable.  While we do not get to intimately know these characters, they are nonetheless both written and acted effectively enough to impress on us why we should care whether or not they make it to the end of the movie.

Even though Godzilla has relatively little screen time, the build-up between his appearances is commendably effective. Each of the monster's appearances in the film is timed to near perfection and follows meaningful scenes of character development and world-building as opposed to slogging exposition or filler.  Of course, by limiting his exposure to pivotal scenes, the filmmakers are able to stretch their limited budget as far as possible. The digital effects that bring Godzilla to life are remarkable indeed, and while the creature definitely suffers from a pretty noticeable case of "dead eye" in several scenes, the computer-generated imagery on display here still puts to shame the effects work of Hollywood films which had budgets that were well over ten times what this film cost to make (I'm looking at YOU, Thor Love and Thunder).

The film still has a firm connection to its B-movie roots, from the occasional jerky movement of the creature to the sometimes exaggerated actions of its actors, but that only adds to its earnest charm. These guys are definitely punching well above their weight here.     

 The film isn't quite the masterpiece its biggest fans are touting it to be; some of the inherent silliness of the storytelling used weighs it down a little bit, like the crucial scenes where Godzilla appears to be standing in the open sea even though the water beneath him is several hundred meters deep. All that aside, though, it's a sterling example of tight, well-woven storytelling that Hollywood, in its never-ending quest for pushing product on its hapless audience, seems to have forgotten.  Here's hoping Godzilla: Minus One teaches Hollywood how to make good movies again. 

8.5/10