Godzilla Minus One

I’d heard that this was a good film but it was nigh on impossible to see when it was in cinemas. Luckily, it is now available on Netflix and wow, it is exactly as good as people led me to believe. I don’t mean “it is good for a Godzilla film”, I mean this is a good film in its own right AND it absolutely is also a good Godzilla film.

So firstly, if you are a fan of kaiju stomping and chomping their way through populated cities and military forces who foolishly think their puny weapons can stop the rampaging monster then this film absolutely delivers. Godzilla bites through warships, stomps on buildings and blasts all and sundry with atomic breath. Have no worries in this regard, if that is what you want from a Godzilla film, you should be satisfied. If you want Godzilla to be the misunderstood hero who battles a much worse kaiju, then no, you won’t get that but otherwise this is a solid entry in kaiju mayhem.

Meanwhile, we get a film of surprising depth built around Godzilla’s thunderous actions.

Shikishima is a young man trained to be a kamikaze pilot in the final weeks of World War 2. On his first mission he pretends his plane has a fault and lands on a remote island airstrip for “repairs”. Unfortunately for him and the aircraft enigneers, this island has an infamous monster known to the native islanders as (you guessed it) Godzilla.

That night, a relatively small (by Godzilla standards i.e. it’s huge but not ginormous) dinosaur-like beast attacks the airstrip. The engineers beg Shikishima to use the gun in his aircraft to kill the monster but he panics and runs away. In the morning he is one of only a few survivors.

Returning home, he finds his family are dead and his home in ruins. He is scolded by other civilian survivors for being a supposed kamikaze who was still alive. In the ruins of a city he encounters a woman stealing food for a baby. The woman, Nokiro, has also been left without family. The baby she carries is not hers but yet another abandoned soul. Together, the three of the form a kind of ramshackle family in a ramshackle house barely surviving amid the ruins and with Shikishima plagued with guilt and nightmares.

Meanwhile…the USA is conducting nuclear tests in the Pacific…

War, disaster and survivors guilt play out as major themes amid the chaos of an unstoppable force of nature. With Japan in ruins, it now must face a kind of inhuman punishment that people struggle to make sense of. For Shikishima the monster offers a way to make atonement but his guilt and obsession act as a barrier to truly connecting to the family that he found almost by accident.

The idea of Godzilla films in general representing Japanese post-war cultural trauma from both defeat, the brutal impact of Allied conventional bombing and the added horror of the nuclear attacks, is a common one. Here, that connection is both more literal and as a kind of contrast. Godzilla smashes and kills and then, every so often, inflicts a nuclear blast on Japan. However, Godzilla offers no reason for its actions, it acts because that is what it is.

It is not a flawless film. I was struck by an important speech late in the film where a key character contrasts the war with the current conflict with Godzilla. He addresses how cheaply the war had treated human lives and how people were expected to sacrifice themselves without meaning. In contrast, the volunteers who set out to stop Godzilla killing more people are doing so understanding the danger and for a clearer cause. Additionally, they are working together to avoid people suffering. Even so, this speech focuses on how Japanese lives were treated cheaply by the Japanese government, with no recognition of even greater human toll inflected on people in China, Korea and beyond. True, this is undoubtedly how somebody in 1946 Japan would frame things but I doubt we’d see a film set in 1946 Germany that didn’t acknowledge how appalling the Nazis were.

Events lead to a big climax with a scheme to defeat the monster and some great moments. I did get a bit teary at the end.

Cheaply made by Hollywood standards but overall, visually very effective, this is not a complicated story but is still one that manages to deliver on multiple layers.