REVIEW:
What a movie! Finally they got this one right. They’ve been making Godzilla movies for decades and decades, going back to the black and white days. In 2014, there was a new Godzilla film starring Bryan Cranston and Aaron Taylor Johnson, that catapulted the entire Godzilla vs Kong monsterverse (there have been four other movies after that, three with Godzilla, one with just Kong.) And they are all okay. But none of these movies is great. None of them is really artistic or interesting. Godzilla Minus One is the movie that figures out how to be those things.
It’s a Japanese movie, about Japanese characters, with subtitles. It’s set around the time of World War 2 and features a main character who was a kamikaze pilot that refused to kill himself. That’s a great setup right there. And the movie spends more time on the human story than it does on the monster. Now the logic that these movies have been using up until now is that people are coming to see the monster, so who cares about the human story. Godzilla Minus One makes the case that they will get plenty of monster, but if the human story is interesting and if you give the audience characters to care about, it will make a difference. And they’re right.
In the opening scene, we are on a remote island where our pilot has washed up and now finds a bunch of other soldiers staying, when they are attacked by Godzilla. He then joins a team of soldiers and scientists and they take a boat out to sea, hoping to drop bombs that Godzilla will swallow. They are attacked by Godzilla again, and their bomb idea doesn’t work. At this point, we have seen two Godzilla attacks in close proximity to each other. We are about to get a third. Godzilla attacks the city. He walks around smashing buildings. And all of it looks fantastic. This movie won an Oscar for computer effects and boy was it well deserved.
After the city attack, we spend a while with our characters planning out how they can take Godzilla down. For the first time, there is a solid chunk of the movie that does not feature Godzilla. This is the second half of the movie, and it’s okay, because we have already gotten our Godzilla fill, with the movie putting so many attacks in the first half. That being said, it might have been nice if the attacks were spaced out a little better, so that they were peppered in throughout the film, instead of having this large gap with no attacks. But of course we do get one more for the climax, and it’s just as great as the others.
The movie works because it takes the less is more approach. It doesn’t overdo it with the crazy things it can have Godzilla do, trying to one up the movies that came before. Instead, it focusses on the human story of a man and woman who are raising a daughter together, and yet are not in a romantic relationship that they will admit to. They are in love with each other, but never let the other one know that, and instead tell each other that they are staying together just to raise the child. This man, of course, is our kamikaze pilot, who is dealing with a lot on his plate. Setting his story in the middle of these Godzilla attacks is pretty smart. This turns out to be a very impressive and exciting movie.