"Godzilla Minus One": review

Minami Hamabe as Noriko Oishi, with Godzilla bearing down on her part of town.

[WARNING: some spoilers, but not the biggest ones.]

What happens to your life when you prove to be a dishonorable coward twice over, costing lives because you failed to act at a crucial moment? Is redemption possible? "Godzilla Minus One" attempts to answer this question in what has to be one of the most heartfelt, human, and character-driven monster movies I've ever seen. A 2023 film written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki (or the Japanese way: Yamazaki Takashi), who is also a special-effects expert, "Godzilla Minus One" is arguably more about the people than it is about the monster. Godzilla is presented in the film as a random, vaguely explained force of nature—a huge, mutated, radioactive lizard bent on destroying human civilization, with a particular focus on Japan, perhaps because parts of the archipelago were recently irradiated by US atom bombs (the story starts at the end of World War II). What concerns the film more are the lives of some of the citizens who lost loved ones during the war and are now trying to rebuild the nation and their own lives. The appearance of Godzilla interrupts all of this, revisiting the nightmare of mass death and helplessness in the face of an overpowering enemy.

It is late 1945, and kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) has chickened out of doing his patriotic duty, choosing to live instead of slamming his plane into American warships, as would have been the honorable thing to do. He lands on the island of Odo, where mechanics tend to his plane. The head mechanic, Sosaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), quickly realizes that there's nothing wrong with the plane, and Shikishima is a coward who has fled the battle. That night, Godzilla—not at full size quite yet—appears at Odo and rampages through the simple base where Japanese zeroes are repaired and sent back to war. As the monster is thrashing Tachibana's crew, Tachibana screams for Shikishima to get in his plane and blast Godzilla (who is known, in whispers, as a recent legend to the island's natives). Shikishima, scared out of his wits, makes it into his plane but freezes up the moment he has the monster in his sights. Failing to shoot Godzilla, Shikishima can only watch in impotent horror as the monster kills almost everyone. Come morning, Shikishima wakes from a faint to find Tachibana dragging all of his comrades' corpses into a line so they can be tallied up. When he sees the cowardly Shikishima has awakened, Tachibana flies into a rage, accusing Shikishima of not stopping the monster when he'd had the chance. Shikishima has not only deserted the war: he has let a team of men die—men undeserving of such a fate.

A few months later, Shikishima is back in war-torn Tokyo. The nukes have gone off in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Japan has surrendered, and the citizens living in the smoking wreckage are doing what they can to survive and rebuild. Back in his old neighborhood, Shikishima encounters his neighbor (Sakura Ando), who also realizes he's a cowardly deserter. Having lost his parents, Shikishima wanders aimlessly when a random woman runs by, handing him a bundle as she flees a gang of men running after her. The bundle proves to be a little baby girl named Akiko (Sae Nagatani). When the random woman pops out of hiding later to retrieve Akiko, we learn that her name is Noriko (Minami Hamabe). Noriko had been given the baby by a dying mother; she feels a duty to care for her, and Shikishima rather passively accepts their company as he settles back into his old, shattered home and attempts to rebuild a life. A couple years pass; Shikishima's house and neighborhood both look much improved, and the three have become, awkwardly, a family of unrelated people, with Shikishima as a somewhat unwilling father and Noriko as a more earnest mother to Akiko. 

As a way to earn money, Shikishima has taken up the risky but well-paying job of exploding the thousands of mines laid along the Japanese coast during the war by both US and Japanese forces. He serves aboard the Shinsei Maru, a humble wooden vessel whose virtue lies in the fact that, being made out of wood, it doesn't attract the US-made magnetic mines. Shikishima, with his military training, proves to be an excellent shot and is able to explode mines at a distance after they've been brought to the surface. It's during one of these sorties that the ship encounters Godzilla again, but the monster is much larger this time, and as the crew discovers to its horror, Godzilla is able to regenerate immediately despite receiving a grievous head wound after it eats a mine that Shikishima shoots. Shikishima has spent the past couple of years experiencing nightmares of both the war and Godzilla's attack; he also thinks he can see and hear the ghosts of the men on Odo Island who'd been killed by Godzilla. The return of the monster merely cranks up his survivor's guilt and postwar trauma. A nearby destroyer blasts Godzilla before it can sink the Shinsei Maru, but the kaiju turns on the destroyer and violently sinks it. The Japanese government has now been alerted to the monster's presence, but it keeps the news under wraps to avoid causing a mass panic. With the US unwilling to provide too much aid to Japan because that might provoke the ever-present Soviets, the Japanese citizenry, once they become aware of the problem, eventually realize they will have to take care of Godzilla on their own. As this is happening, Shikishima sees an opportunity for redemption.

The title of the movie was a mystery to me: what could "Minus One" possibly mean? After doing a bit of online research, I discovered the answer: it's basically a form of Japanglish, i.e., something English-like and culturally specific that the Japanese public might instantly understand while remaining obscure to Westerners. Essentially: Japan had been brought to zero by the war against America, so what could possibly bring it lower than zero? Enter Godzilla (pronounced "Gojira" by everyone in the film), a random force of nature that appears and hits Japan while it's already down. While other iterations of the Godzilla story make it clear that the kaiju is basically an irradiated, mutated lizard that has acquired special physical and cognitive powers, in this movie, Godzilla's origins are left open to speculation although its rapid growth and radioactivity hint at atomic power gone rampant. In discussions of the monster over the decades, most people have long seen Godzilla as a symbol for the atom bomb and, by extension, the terrible might of the American military. Godzilla's symbolic meaning and role in stories have both evolved throughout the years, but the primal beast we meet in this movie strikes me as a return to form. Godzilla could in theory navigate the oceans and wreak havoc anywhere, but it seems to like returning to Japan.

I'll join the ranks of all the other critics who praised the film for its very human story, the script's ability to make you care for the main characters, and the amazing special effects executed on what would be considered the barest of shoestring budgets had this been a Hollywood film. Characterization, throughout the story, is excellent. I honestly disliked and disdained Shikishima for most of the movie, which I think was the idea, but his despicable cowardice made his eventual redemption more meaningful even if it was at least somewhat predictable. Without spoiling the ending, I can say that I'm of two minds about a couple moments at the tail end of the film—moments that potentially take away from the deep emotions we've experienced. Part of my ambivalence comes from the fact that one of moments I'm obliquely referring to is a reminder that, being a monster movie, "Godzilla Minus One" contains at least some horror elements that might be resolved in a sequel.

The cast does a superb job of playing their respective roles without falling too deeply into the sappy sentimentality you'd find in a Korean production. There're some weepy moments at the end, but these moments feel earned—the characters have been through hell—and not merely treacly. Hats off to director Yamazaki, who applied his special-effects wizardry to give us an adventure that was both on a grand scale and still relatably personal. It's hard to juggle the macro and the micro like that, but Yamazaki somehow managed to pull it off. "Godzilla Minus One" is watchable as a human drama that just happens to have a monster in it. I'm not normally into kaiju, etc. films; the last monster movie I watched was the goofy "Kong: Skull Island." But this movie had a heart.

If I have a plot-logic complaint, it's this: the Japanese plan to defeat Godzilla involves wrapping the monster up with huge canisters of Freon after luring it out to a deep part of the ocean: the idea then is to blow the tanks, causing the water to become less dense and forcing Godzilla to sink to the ocean floor where the sheer pressure ought to kill it. Plan B, should Godzilla prove too strong for that, is to wrap the creature in a bunch of giant emergency balloons to bring the monster rapidly back to the surface in the hopes of killing it through rapid decompression. But during this final battle, when Godzilla has been lured out to the open sea and is presumably over a deep spot, it rears up and appears to be standing on something—which shouldn't be possible if it's over a deep chasm. That doesn't make any sense. Or I could be misunderstanding something about that scene. And while I'm at it: someone will have to explain why Godzilla's death-ray breath does what it does. It's not enough that it shoots what looks like a giant, blue energy beam that destroys everything it touches: when the beam "lands," it gives rise to what is essentially an atomic mushroom cloud. Is this special effect there as a heavy-handed reminder that Godzilla used to be a metaphor for American nuclear might? Also: if Godzilla's mushroom clouds are indeed of the nuclear variety, then several of the main characters really ought to be dead from cancer.

Those problems aside, the movie's plot is well written and propulsive; there's never a boring moment. Western audiences might snicker involuntarily at seeing shrimpy Asian men screaming in bellicose fury (it's a bit like being growled at by a Pomeranian—hard to take seriously), but foreigners familiar with East Asia ought to have a better time of it. Taken as a whole, I'd say this was a good, enjoyable film that I'm very likely to watch again. Oh, I should also mention that the movie slips in a ton of social commentary about the underhanded nature of the Japanese government, which one character bitterly remarks controls the flow of information as a "specialty." There were plenty of opportunities to take political digs at the United States for having atom-bombed Japan, but the movie is remarkably rancor-free (unlike, say, the Korean film Goemul, which rather pointedly blames the US as the cause of that movie's monster problem). Quite the opposite: "Godzilla Minus One" can be seen and related to by non-Japanese audiences. There are certainly culturally specific elements that most of us foreigners won't pick up on, but on the whole, the movie works on its own terms, offering something to everyone. I remain impressed by how painstaking the characterization is: you really do feel for, and root for, all the principals.