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Review by E.C. McMullen Jr. |
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GODZILLA MINUS ONE- 2023Japan Release: Nov. 3, 2023 USA Release: Dec. 1, 2023 Toho Rated: PG-13 |
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If this is the first Godzilla movie review you've read from me then know that, going in, I'm Koo Koo for Kaiju. GODZILLA was the first monster movie I remember watching (my first Monster was a still of Max Shrek from the 1922 silent movie, NOSFERATU).
The first time I saw GODZILLA I was young enough to believe that it could be real. The titan stayed with me ever since.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE begins as a prequel.
1945
It's near the end of the war in the Pacific. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were virtually wiped out by atomic bombs, and possibly the last Kamikaze pilot, Koichi Shikishima (Rynosuke Kamiki: THE GREAT YOKAI WAR, BIG MAN JAPAN, THE GREAT YOKAI WAR: GUARDIANS, GHOST BOOK) has lost the will to die for his country by gaining the will to live. He lands his plane, fully loaded, on an island in the Pacific that's there to refuel Kamikaze planes and repair those en route to their ships at sea, where they are outfitted with bombs.
Koichi already has his bomb. Which means he left a ship. So why is he here?
Once the island mechanics go over his plane its obvious there's nothing wrong with it. Lead mechanic Sosaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki: BATTLE ROYALE II, TIME TRAVELER) knows Koichi abandoned his mission. He's a coward.
Normally this would likely be a death sentence, the other soldiers filled with anger. But the war is nearly over, their spirit is beaten, they wait for a rescue that may never come, and they feel more discouraged than rage. One comes forward to admit he doesn't blame Shikishima. They're defeated anyway: Everybody knows it.
That night, however, a horror so maddening the men cannot believe it, comes to their island. A creature that was presaged earlier in the day by the floating dead bodies of deep sea fish, believed to be so frightened they swam to the surface to die, rather than face whatever's below.
A creature that can only be described by the soldiers as a dinosaur comes wreaking havoc, killing nearly everyone.
It doesn't feed off of them, it's just a killing machine without known reason.
Koichi has a chance to redeem himself. Sosaku orders him to run to his plane, already on the airfield, and use his high-powered gun to kill the monster. That armament was made for penetrating the thick metal hulls of battleships. It can defeat this thing!
Koichi can't bring himself to do it and nearly everyone is killed. The only survivor is Koichi and what's left of the injured Tachibana.
1946
Shikishima is back to what remains of his hometown of Tokyo. His parents died during the bombing of Tokyo in early 1945. What's left of his family home is a few tattered rooms. One of his neighbors, Sumiko Ota (Sakura Ando: THE GREAT YOKAI WAR: GUARDIANS, MONSTER [2023]) remembers that Koichi was a kamikaze pilot. If he's alive then he abandoned his mission. Her anger fueled heartache is palpable. All of her family and friends are dead, because there were too many cowards like Koichi!
Overwhelmed by survivor's guilt and shame, Shikishima accepts her anger.
After the war there are enough orphans to go around, however, and a young woman named Noriko Oshi (Minami Hamabe: AJIN: DEMI-HUMAN), happens across Koichi and presses him into helping her take care of another orphan, the infant Akiko. The baby's dying Mother begged Noriko to care for Akiko and Noriko couldn't refuse. But she also has nothing. Like many she has no house, no food, no protector. Akiko will starve to death if she doesn't find someone and she nearly bullies Koichi into helping her.
So this makeshift family begins in famished poverty. Whatever wealth Japan once had is gone. The people must start all over again at 0.
Everything is a struggle: shelter form the elements, food, uncontaminated water, bathroom, and of course a baby needs so much.
Eventually things start to turn for the better when Shikishima gets a high paying job. It pays far above average because the risk is high. Koichi is employed indirectly from the government to be a gunner on a minesweeper. Every single day on the job may be his last, but they are that desperate.
That desperate and, because Koichi sees the devastation all around him, counts himself among the guilty who brought this on his people.
The boats are made of wood because floating mines are magnetic, made to attach themselves to the metal hulls of warships.
Then President Harry Truman decided to continue atomic bomb testing and of the many choices offered to him, he chose to do it in the ugliest, most racist way possible: The 1946 Bikini Atoll tests.
As it so happens, the Godzilla creature is nearby, sleeping at the bottom of the ocean, and the bomb testing not only wakes it up, but mutates it.
1947
Come the new year , the massive Godzilla creature makes its way to Japan and now we've got ourselves a GODZILLA movie!
If the war left the citizens of Japan at zero, Godzilla will leave them at Minus one: thus the title. In the context of this movie, the people of Japan are nowhere close to the end of their suffering for the holocaust they visited on the rest of Asia and only Emperor Hirohito, the God King who started it all, will survive unscathed to rule over the ashes of his country.
GODZILLA MINUS ONE makes it clear that stopping the GODZILLA creature is strictly Do It Yourself, DIY. The Americans won't help because they're busy in diplomatic battles with the nearby USSR over who gains dominance over the area.
The Japanese Government won't help. Militarily speaking, they're practically helpless. So they forcibly restrict all media mention of what's happening - in the name of the Common Good. If hundreds of thousands of people who could have been evacuated, die in Tokyo and Ginza? Well, millions of Japanese won't be alarmed at the new threat, so keeping a lid on any knowledge of the monster is for The Common Good.
It's up to the citizens themselves, forming a kind of community outreach program, to end the Godzilla creature's reign of terror.
In this version of events, GODZILLA MINUS ONE serves as both a prequel to 1954's GOJIRA and a reboot.
Okay, now that I've told you all of that, what did I think of it? I saw it with my nephew and we were FLOORED!
HOLY CRAP! This is the best GODZILLA movie I've seen since the first!
Gareth Edwards 2014 GODZILLA was great! Several steps up from the tedious doldrums the franchise had sunk to, but GODZILLA MINUS ONE is outstanding!
When that young, relatively small Godzilla creature came onto the outpost island at the start, I knew what that would lead to. This sucker is gonna get bigger and its already a seemingly unstoppable monster.
The first GOJIRA movie, directed by Ishiro Honda, focused primarily on the human drama and suffering that such a creature would wreak on civilization. It's 1954 and thanks to a furious sense of a better future for their children (well, save for the mobster parasites who want to keep everyone in poverty and suffering, including themselves and their own families thanks to the diminishing returns of too many), Japanese workers have a Can-Do attitude and have rebuilt much of Japan in record time.
Then this damn creature, more of myth and legend than anything ever known or seen, comes seemingly out of nowhere and obliterates all of their hard work and sacrifice in a single go!
In GODZILLA MINUS ONE, Japan isn't even on its wobbly feet, has barely got to its knees, and this ferocious son of a bitch comes tearing everything down. This creature isn't feeding, this thing isn't hungry, it destroys to destroy.
59 year old Writer, Director, Visual Effects Artist, Takashi Yamazaki (RETURNER [Director, Writer, VFX], SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMAMOTO [Director, VFX], PARASYTE [Director, Writer, VFX: all], SHIN GODZILLA [VFX]) has a feel, like few in live action Japanese Horror cinema do, of conveying the deep hopelessness of being confronted by a seemingly unstoppable force. That is, without coming across as maudlin. What I've seen of Japanese cinema that conveyed this balance of humanity and spectacle can be distilled to two movies, RINGU and RETURNER. And Yamazaki wrote and directed RETURNER!
GODZILLA MINUS ONE has the strength and heart to become one of the top 100 movies of all time!
5 Shriek Girls
This review copyright 2023 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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