.

Director / Screenwriter / Visual Effects Supervisor: Takashi Yamazaki

By Marilyn Ferdinand

As the credits rolled and the lights came up in the theater, one of my fellow moviegoers stood up and yelled, “King of the Monsters.” I pumped my fist in agreement. Yes, we had just seen Godzilla prove yet again that he is an inexhaustible source of entertainment, inspiration, and spine-tingling thrills. The franchise has spawned 38 films, as well as television series, novels, comic books, video games, and other merchandise, but Godzilla Minus One is the film that Toho, the Japanese studio that started it all, thought most fitting to make for the big guy’s 70th anniversary. They chose very well. Multi-award-winning director and screenwriter Takashi Yamazaki is well known for his visual effects, making him a natural to bring Godzilla back at Toho. But he has done much more than create first-rate action sequences. He has brought the story back to its original time period and reflected on the physical, mental, and emotional state of his country following its defeat in World War II.

The film opens in 1945, near the end of the war. Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot, is seen landing his plane fatefully on the pockmarked, dirt runway of Odo Island, the location of a Japanese repair base. The mechanics look his plane over as he catches his breath. Finding nothing amiss, one of the mechanics goes over to Shikishima and commends him for not throwing his life away on a lost cause. When night falls, however, a monster the people of Odo Island call Godzilla emerges from the sea. Their rifles ineffective against this living dinosaur, the mechanics urge Shikishima to get into his plane, where his big, 20mm guns stand ready to shoot it down. He does so, but when the creature is in range, he freezes in fear. In the morning, he awakens next to the corpses of the base’s mechanics, laid out respectfully by the only survivor besides himself, Tachibana (Munetake Aoki). When the two men are on a boat ferrying them back to Japan, Tachibana hands photos of the families who will never see their loved ones again to Shikishima as an enduring reminder of his cowardice.

Eventually, Shikishima returns to civilian life. The fire-bombed ruins of Tokyo reveal that his family home has been destroyed and his parents killed. He sets up a crude shelter in the rubble and, despite his reluctance, takes in Noriko (Minami Hamabe), a war orphan like himself, and the baby she promised its dying mother to look after. In time, Shikishima lands a job as an ocean minesweeper, becoming a valuable member of a close-knit crew who shows his worth by knowing how to blow up the mines safely. The wages he gets for this dangerous work pay for a sturdy home he builds for his chosen family.

Soon, reports of an enormous monster preying on boats start coming in. Godzilla—bigger, badder, and possessing radioactive powers—has decided that Tokyo is his territory and comes to settle in. With firsthand experience of Godzilla, Shikishima, along with his plucky gang of minesweepers, moves to help rid Japan of this new threat. They stall for time while awaiting the arrival of one of Japan’s decommissioned battle cruisers to annihilate the monster with its cannons. The crew drops a couple of mines they have onboard in Godzilla’s path. Shikishima manages to blow up one of them inside Godzilla’s mouth, only to have the monster regenerate its injured tissue. When the cruiser arrives, Godzilla burns the battleship like a matchstick with its heat breath. The stunned minesweepers return, demoralized, to shore. The riled monster wastes little time in showing his displeasure at his treatment. A few days later, Godzilla heads back to Japan and flattens the Ginza area of Tokyo in a spectacular show of strength.

The first Godzilla film posits the United States as the villain whose atomic bombs unleashed Godzilla’s tremendous power. Of course, Godzilla is a metaphor for the American annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but Yamazaki is much more nuanced in laying blame for Japan’s death toll. Yes, in Godzilla Minus One, postwar atomic tests on Bikini Atoll in Godzilla’s oceanic territory imbued the monster with its radioactive fire power, but his destructiveness is nothing compared to the suffering of the Japanese people at the hands of their own government. Yamazaki’s characters aver that life was held too cheaply, with the country’s ineffective supply chains and services killing half the population due to illness and starvation. Godzilla Minus One doesn’t let either nation off the hook, however. The U.S. will not help battle the monster because it is in a dangerous parlay with the Soviet Union, and Japan will do nothing to warn the nation of the new danger they face. The Japanese public, already at its lowest ebb, is now at minus one in its battle for survival.

We’ve been bombarded with decades of ever-emptier superheroes, including preternatural humans like Ethan Hunt of the Mission: Impossible franchise, that, while entertaining, may be sapping our individual and collective belief in our own ability to right the wrongs in the world. Godzilla Minus One takes us back to a time when people were more connected and faced their problems together in as realistic a manner as possible. In this film, Japan is a country whose human and built environments have been decimated, seemingly far from having the will and resources to tackle a problem as apparently insoluble as a giant, radioactive monster with territorial conquest on its mind (incidentally suggestive of the challenges that Russia and China pose to the world order today).

Yet, over and over, this bowed population is determined to fight for life. I loved the low-tech nature of the science Kenji “Doc” Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a bushy-haired engineer and part of the minesweeper brotherhood, puts forward as a way to defeat Godzilla, as well as the slide show projected on white screens that communicates the plan to the ex-servicemen who have been asked to volunteer for the mission. Just reunited with their families, some choose not to join the effort. Most do, however, hoping to fight for their country and win. Importantly, they pledge to do it without losing a single life. That’s a tall order, given the decommissioned and damaged ships they will have to use and the incredible timing needed to put Godzilla in position to make the plan work.

The film is packed with well-rendered and well-thought-out action sequences. The first appearance of Godzilla shows his penchant for picking things up in his mouth—in this case, the mechanics—and flinging them through the air. His rampage in Ginza includes a sequence where he does just that with a commuter train Noriko is riding, leaving her car broken in half while she dangles precariously from an axle. I also loved the scenes of Godzilla swimming like a Galapagos iguana, whipping his tail from side to side with his head pointed menacingly forward.

Godzilla’s superheated breath starts off a little silly, as, one by one, his dorsal spines stiffen and glow blue like the lights on an internet modem as it charges to full strength; after that, it’s pure terror. The computer-generated Godzilla, while scary and vicious, is also a bit cheesy, still looking a bit like a man in a rubber suit. I liked these tributes to the simpler monster Ishirō Honda unleashed in his 1954 film, and found them in keeping with the period ethos of the film. The sound design even uses Godzilla’s original roar, created by playing it over loud speakers and recording it for the new soundtrack.

Equally impressive are the human dimensions of the film. Shikishima bears a heavy burden of guilt for his failure of nerve, exacerbated by Sumiko (Sakura Ando), a neighbor of his parents who blames his cowardice for the deaths of her children. Yet, she becomes a part of his makeshift family when Noriko and Shikishima fumble at trying to tend to baby Akiko. Shikishima has held Noriko at arm’s length, refusing to marry her even though he wants to because of his shame. He finally confesses to her that he can’t move forward with a real life because his war is not over.

The final battle scene is stirring as an example of unity of purpose, even including an echo of the Dunkirk flotilla that came to the rescue of stymied British troops. Shikishima prepares to fly his kamikaze mission after all to end Godzilla’s reign of terror with the help of the one mechanic who has the least reason to help him. The denouement of that battle offers an image of reconciliation and of doing the right thing for the future of the Japanese people. I’d say Godzilla Minus One delivers a message of hope that we all need right now.