December 12, 2023 – As an “Original Godzilla” fan of many years, I’d like to urge you all to get out of your house for an evening and catch Godzilla—Minus One, the latest back-to-basics reboot of the venerable monster, now playing at the Del Oro Theatre in Grass Valley.
While by no means a kaiju fan, I dug the first Godzilla movie when I saw the Americanized version of the original 1954 Japanese movie under the title Godzilla: King of the Monsters! While Rodan (1957) remains my favorite in that genre, I always make it a point to see the occasional reboots that The Toho Company, the producers, send out, including the last one, Shin Godzilla (2017). (BTW: his original—meaning real–Japanese name was “Gojira,” a fun fact about which I’m happy to pontificate: You say “Godzilla.” I say “Gojira.”)
Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki’s new version was produced to honor the big guy’s seventieth birthday. Like other Godzillas, it’s meant to mirror of our current anxieties, where we feel beaten down by multiple crises: climate change, Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and the rise of reactionary tyrants. This Godzilla tries to swallow it all while also trying to be an in-depth, realistic character study of a man’s journey from cowardice to courage.
Godzilla Minus One opens in 1945, about eight years before the 1954 version, when World War II in the Pacific is reaching its violent conclusion. The hero, Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a Kamikaze pilot who’s decided to opt out from his suicidal duty. He lands his Zero—whose cockpit was somehow not locked shut as was the rule to guard against pilot remorse–at the remote Japanese outpost of Odo Island. There, Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), a sympathetic flight mechanic, offers Koichi shelter along with other Japanese Army castoffs, all of them hoping to wait out the end of the war in peace.
Then, one night, Godzilla, then a mere local legend (as was King Kong) stomps ashore. The attack kills nearly everyone and reveals Koichi to be a coward. A year later, Koichi returns in disgrace to mainland Japan to find Tokyo destroyed, his family dead and his cowardly reputation preceding him.
A total outcast, Koichi forms a chaste relationship with another outcast, Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) who’s also taking care of Akiko, a war orphan. Together, the little ad hoc family slowly build themselves a new life. This long sequence carefully depicts the Japanese people’s efforts to rebuild their society with the vivid, closely observed detail seen in the realistic postwar dramas of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirö Ozu.
Koichi eventually joins the crew of a minesweeper who are tasked with clearing out the sixty-thousand mines planted around Tokyo harbor by both the Japanese and US Navies. It’s already dangerous work but the stakes rise to the stratosphere when Godzilla, no longer a backwoods legend, swims into view, bigger, stronger, and meaner than before, thanks to the US nuclear bomb tests that have mutated him into a super monster who breathes nuclear firebombs when pushed too far.
The fight is on as Godzilla stomps Tokyo, tearing down what Koichi and everyone else has worked so hard to rebuild, all with his usual panache.
In this telling, both the US and Japanese governments are too busy countering Soviet threats in the region to fight Godzilla, even though he’s killed 40,000 people and returned Tokyo to rubble. Like the unlocked cockpit, this seems especially unlikely, but by leaving the Japanese people to face Godzilla on their own, the film cleverly turns their war into a grassroots struggle as lowly Koichi and his roughhewn shipmates play David against Goliath. This time, the faceless, fleeing masses turn around and fight back. With only some rudimentary science and a few scraps of military know-how, Koichi and his friends jerry rig an incredible contraption to bring the Big Guy to his knees once again.
Godzilla—Minus One is great stuff for much of the way for Original Godzilla fans. Director Yamazaki has mounted a terrific production that portrays a world laid low by repeated disaster. Godzilla’s attacks are shot with the same wide-angle grandeur seen in Shin Godzilla and are genuinely awe-inspiring. In a nod to the original, Godzilla roars with the same eerie thunder. Composer Naoki Satô has also layered in passages from the original 1954 music score, along with the haunting thump of Godzilla’s mighty footfalls.
Even so, this Godzilla seems unable to surmount the problem with today’s digitally constructed monsters. Even with all the marvelous details, Godzilla, like other giants, still seems short on physical substance, made up as he is of pixels, not of a guy in a suit or a clay model, which at least convey a sense of weight.
Further, at two hours, this Godzilla feels like a long march that left me feeling torn in two directions. Much of the two-plus hour running time is spent trying to juxtapose the fantasy of Godzilla against the complex reality of Koichi’s struggle to recover from war’s trauma and find the courage within.
Character is central to building suspense in a genre picture, but it can be carried too far, as I think it is here. Koichi’s character is delved into with such psychological detail and with such emotion, you may feel, as I did, that you’re watching a different movie: say, Ozu’s Tokyo Story or Kurosawa’s Ikiru, achingly serious melodramas also set in post-war Japan that had no need of giant radioactive lizards. This film wants to evoke the same feelings but I’m not sure I buy it. The links between the war and the monster, only hinted at in previous versions, are here made so explicit they threaten to cancel each other out.
The contrast is almost laughable. For many viewers, a film solely about the aftermath of the Tokyo fire bombings would carry much more emotion minus the giant lizard. If this trend continues, I fear, some producer somewhere will put Killers of the Flower Moon . . . with Zombies on his slate. Heaven help us…
Whose movie, I asked, is this anyway? I think it’s Godzilla’s. I paid less attention to Koichi’s struggle for redemption while I kept my ear to the ground for that familiar thundering tread. In future, I’ll keep listening . . . until next time, when he rises again in all his grand singularity. For sure, some future disaster will call him back to us again.
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” is in the current issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark.