Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki, 2023)

In 1954, a movie icon was born. Godzilla, a towering reptilian beast, the unintended consequence of American nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, thrilled audiences as he tore through Tokyo, while exploring what it meant to be the only nation in the world against whom a nuclear weapon has ever been used. Before he became a hero in later films, before he became an icon protecting the citizens of Japan from a cadre of other kaiju (giant monsters), Godzilla was a terrifying force of nature, inflicting death and destruction on the citizens of Japan. Director Ishiró Honda, along with his fellow co-writers, Takeo Murata and Shigeru Kayama used this behemoth to tell a decidedly anti-war story and gave birth to one of the longest lasting, globally beloved characters to ever come out of the movies. Godzilla is in the same league as Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, King Kong, Jesus and Muhammad where cultural saturation is concerned.

With the seventy year anniversary of the original Godzilla coming in 2024, Toho Studios has released Godzilla Minus One, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki. Yamazaki manages to take everyone's favorite titanic lizard back to his origins, without creating a stale retread. It is a wholly satisfying monster movie, while also being an effective anti-war statement, in a very different way than the original. It is a welcome surprise to find out Godzilla Minus One is far, far better than it has any right to be from a franchise that's seventy years old, with this many films already featuring the character, especially given some of the places this character has been taken during his adventures as an icon.

Godzilla Minus One is a definitive, creative answer to the question, "Why don't they just let these franchises die?" We know these franchises don't die because they make money. What that question is really asking is whether or not there are any good creative reasons to keep them going. Godzilla Minus One provides an answer suggesting that in the hands of someone with the right creative vision, franchises and iconic characters can still be vital, effective, relevant and timely. The story here isn't just tacked together as an excuse to get our favorite skyscraper wrecking atomic lizard back on the big screen. Yamazaki has something to say, and he says it with tenderness and humanity, while giving us all the mayhem and destruction we expect from a Godzilla movie.

Where the original was about the effects on Japan of World War II and the atomic age it brought into existence, Godzilla Minus One is about the effects of war on the people who've had to individually wage it, and offers a more human perspective on where we can find hope when the state fails us. It manages to incorporate the spirit of the original, while being it's own film. Yamazaki makes it very much his own, different take on the themes and ideas of the original, combined with a strong sense of what makes a story engaging, and the technical expertise required for an effects heavy film dealing with the spectacle of this scale.

In Godzilla Minus One, Godzilla is properly frightening. With 2016's, Shin Godzilla, Toho demonstrated they could take technology from the past, marry it with modern special effects and give audiences something that feels visceral, with a creature that feels like it has weight, dimensions and adheres to some sense of real world physics. Here, they take it a step further, and Yamazaki adds some brilliant directorial touches that help make Godzilla feel very real. The terror he creates when he strikes feels consequential. Yamazaki is focused on the way human beings react to this gargantuan terror. Of course, there's a degree of spectacle to all of this, but it doesn't feel empty. It doesn't feel like an excuse to show off the special effects or a "give the audience what they want" motivation. When we see Godzilla tromping through a city, we are seeing it through the eyes of the people fleeing in terror, and some of the small details Yamazaki includes are so well observed, they feel recognizable in an age when we have cell phone footage of basically every major world event or disaster. There are moments when the sense of awe and disbelief feel palpable.

The big guy has never looked this good either. I don't know if this is fully CG or if this is an amalgamation of different techniques, but Godzilla looks neither like a guy in a rubber suit or a weightless, dimensionless, physics free creation of pixels. The sequences featuring Godzilla rampaging through one populated area or another are among the best any movie about a giant monster has ever given us. The level of work, care and attention that's gone into making him look and feel like an organic creature of gargantuan size, mass and weight is something every other filmmaker working with special effects can learn from. Considering this was achieved on a fifteen million dollar budget feels like a miracle when compared to the tentpole franchises in America which have, of late, had budgets into the hundreds of millions and can't seem to pull the illusion of special effects off with anything near this success.

Ryunosuke Kamiki as Koichi Shikishima and Minami Hamabe as Noriko Oishi are excellent in the leads, humanizing characters who could easily have felt like cardboard cutouts. In fact, the whole cast is very good. These characters could have devolved into empty stereotypes, but that's what Yamazaki's script seems most interested in, the emotional lives of these people who've already survived something cataclysmic, before Godzilla comes along to do his stomp, stomp, chomp, chomp routine.

From a genre perspective, one of the reasons movies about giant monsters, be it Godzilla or Kong, can be interesting is the way that they're a mixture of other sub genres. They're disaster movies, but the disaster is a giant animal. They have a consciousness, but they're not exactly following what we'd normally recognize as logic or reason. They're forces of nature, with motivations we don't necessarily understand or in this case, we don't have the luxury of even caring about. Godzilla Minus One manages to take the best of the disaster movie and mix it with bits of the animals/nature attacks sub genre, giving us a strong plot framework on which to hang everything else. What we get, as a result, is Godzilla as catalyst for the story about post WWII Japan, and the character arcs and themes follow. It uses the mechanics of animal attack movies in order to deal with Godzilla, but it's story architecture and character journeys are out of the disaster movie sub genre. One of the smart things about approaching the film and the character of Godzilla this way is it returns him to feeling like a force of nature. It doesn't really matter why Godzilla is stomping around different parts of Japan. What matters is the cost in lives, and what that means for the people who were part of waging a losing war just a few years prior.

Another interesting change from the original is that this isn't quite so explicitly an anti-nuclear weapons movie. Not that Yamazaki is waving the pro-nuke flag, but this one positions nuclear weapons as a symptom of larger problems. Godzilla Minus One has some interesting things to say about the state, the use of state power, and the way it effects the lives of the people who actually have to execute the orders. Neither the Japanese government, nor The United States gets off the hook, and in a way, both are treated somewhat like Godzilla, except they don't have physical bodies which can be attacked in order to repel them. Godzilla and the state are both looming powers, whose influence and effect is dire. Unlike the US movies, there is no super secret government agency, figuring everything out and coming to the rescue. In Godzilla Minus One, the Japanese government so disastrously went on with a dire, stupid war, it's left as a ward of the United States and is incapable of handling even the basic functions of the state. The United States is so wrapped up in and focused on the Cold War, it can't meet the responsibility it's position as conservator of the Japanese state calls for in the face of the threat Godzilla presents.

Miraculously, this monster movie from a franchise which over time became the equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon, ends up having something touching and profound to say. Godzilla Minus One has something to say about the ways the needs of the state end up shaping society, which then shapes how we see ourselves, our lives and our dreams within it. It's asking questions about whose interests the military serves, and whose interest it's in to serve in the military, as well as what alternatives we have, but it isn't didactic or preachy either. Yamazaki knows when to be subtle, and when not to be, in order to make his case clear without making it a lecture.

If nothing else, Godzilla Minus One is going to end up being one of the films we hold up as exemplary of the best in the canon of reboots, requels and remakes. The question for the film fans and historians in the future will be, "Are ten bad bad films made from returning to the well of intellectual property worth the one excellent film and story that comes along when someone has the right creative tools?" Personally, my answer is yes. That's the nature of the beast. Every genre and sub genre has at least ten (if not more) not great or outright terrible films, based on the same premises and ideas for every film that manages to tell an effective, compelling story with characters we care about. Takashi Yamazaki is the right person to have taken on this taks. After all these years, and the dozens of films, cartoons and so on, Godzilla Minus One pulls off the magic trick that is finding a new way to tell a compelling, thoughtful story with a character that had more or less become a joke compared to its origins. Not that there's anything wrong with Godzilla being the star of what were essentially kids movies as the franchise went on, but there's something incredibly satisfying in seeing the character used to say something consequential again, without the use of satire, as Shin Godzilla did.

As a writer and genre fan, I can't feel anything but respect for what Yamazaki achieves with Godzilla Minus One. The decision to use the same time period as the original film gave him the ability to bring back the original themes and ideas, while looking at them with the perspective that seventy years of distance provides. He takes the legacy of the original film seriously, and understands why a movie about a giant monster stomping through Tokyo can be taken seriously, without treating it like it's precious. He understands that genre stories aren't best when they're empty spectacle, but when they're vehicles to say something about being human and how we live, and he achieves that goal with resounding success in Godzilla Minus One.