For a film series that has severed into various franchise strands over the past seventy years, it’s fantastic that Godzilla has finally been reborn into a form that’s both refreshing for viewers and comparable to beloved past embodiments. Despite the surface central concept/draw of “big monster smashes city”, Godzilla has famously teemed with metaphors and allegories relating to Japan’s post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki fear of nuclear weapons and atomic devastation. So, with this latest instalment being set in mid post-war Tokyo, mid 1945, makes Godzilla’s origins more pertinent to the plot and characters than most of its recent predecessors.
The story follows Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who lands on the army-occupied Odo Island to get his plane repaired, but when no mechanical faults are found, our “hero” is brandished a coward. Koichi then returns to Tokyo to discover most of his hometown obliterated by Godzilla, and his parents have been killed.
Wracked with guilt and ostracised by a community made aware of his gutlessness, Koichi befriends and provides shelter for a homeless woman, Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe), and the orphaned baby she cares for. Time passes and Koichi lands a job tracking and deactivating American mines from the Sea of Japan, partly to atone for his past cowardice, but Noriko doesn’t want him to go because of the risk, unbeknownst to both that a greater danger awaits.
There’s enough going on in the first thirty minutes of Godzilla Minus One to fill a feature-length drama. The protagonist’s clashing inner conflicts and personal conundrums are such a powerful driving force, the fact that a massive prehistoric reptile is also terrorising the city seems often secondary to the engrossing human drama. Koichi’s arc glides alongside Godzilla’s path of wanton destruction, until strands collide when plans to thwart the beast are unveiled. Godzilla wreaks havoc in spectacular fashion and in intricately rendered splendour during jaw-dropping action sequences, roaring rampant and gargantuan.
With an estimated $15 million budget, writer/director and VFX Supervisor Takashi Yamazaki has lovingly crafted a film which celebrates Godzilla’s origins while transcending and subverting its b-movie trappings and trampling those banal US remakes. It looks better on the big screen than most modern blockbusters, due to skilful melding of CGI, miniatures, and classic creature sound design with cues from Naoki Sato’s score recalling what we love about Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original.
Some of the action feels inelegantly woven with the slow burning drama and can seem a tad jarring while the acting teeters on histrionic, but this is hair-splitting when compared to the multitude of pros which make Godzilla Minus One the best fantasy action film of the year. The 1940s setting also feels surprisingly fresh and iconic, partly due to the creature’s classic design, evoking the Suitmation/man-in-suit technique, but its heart, complex drama and characters complement the outstanding effects and action. Yamazaki’s film an artful, bar-setting, barrier-shattering, near masterpiece in the guise of a behemoth blockbuster that may even move you to tears.
