Review: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Who would have known that one of the most emotionally satisfying dramas of 2023 would happen to feature Godzilla in it? But such is the case with Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, the latest Godzilla feature from Toho Studios and perhaps the closest in spirit and tone to Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original. This is a smartly written and well performed picture with recognizably human themes and satisfying action sequences. Usually, the monster is the main focus in a kaiju picture and the humans are mostly an afterthought, but in Godzilla Minus One, the domestic scenes are as interesting as the disaster ones. The film aces the conventions of the postwar melodrama as well as the disaster picture, making it one of the more pleasant surprises of the past moviegoing year.

The film starts at the tail end of World War II, when kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) abandons his mission and lands on Odo Island under the pretense of fixing his faulty aircraft. But his aircraft isn’t faulty: he just doesn’t see the point in dying for a lost cause as Japan’s defeat to the Allies is all but assured. Before Koichi can be taken to task, the outpost is attacked by Godzilla, a deep-sea dinosaur lizard creature that kills all the men save Koichi and a sole airplane technician. Koichi returns home an ashamed coward and rebuilds his life in Tokyo amid the ruins of his childhood home. His parents are dead and his childhood friend, Sumiko (Sakura Ando), who lost her children in the firebombing, scorns him for his cowardice. Nevertheless, Koichi builds a modest life in Tokyo alongside two fellow survivors: Noriko (Minami Hamabe), a young woman who lost her parents, and Akiko (Sae Nagatani), a baby whose late mother begged Noriko to care for her. Koichi invites them into his home and creates a makeshift family with them.

Godzilla Minus One takes its time in these scenes, building a convincing portrait of Kochi and Noriko’s lives, fears, challenges, and inner demons. We get to know them as people and root for them to improve their situations and care for Akiko. Yamazaki also clearly shows the development of Tokyo and the bayside Ginza neighbourhood over the course of many scenes, with title cards reminding us of the passing years and the noticeable cleanup and rebuilding of the neighbourhood visually conveying the slow recovery of Japan as a whole. Yamazaki never calls attention to the changing environment, but merely uses simple editing to show the changes in the character’s lives and in the city.

Of course, their modest domestic happiness doesn’t last. The pain of war isn’t quickly forgotten. When Koichi gets a job on a minesweeper boat, removing American and Japanese mines from the ocean, he and his fellow crew, including former weapons engineer Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), the captain Yoji (Kuranosuke Sasaki), and young crewman Shiro (Yuki Yamada), are sent to investigate a mysterious disturbance in the waters. It turns out to be Godzilla, who’s coming for Tokyo. Koichi and Noriko’s hardfought peace is about to be undone.

The film then transforms into a disaster picture as Godzilla wreaks havoc on the city and a desperate team of former naval officers plan to defend themselves against the creature. Yamazaki does what many modern filmmakers do and makes the monster synonymous with the trauma of the hero. But it works here unlike in many other films. It feeds Koichi’s emotional motivations, but also the film’s carefully crafted postwar atmosphere, where every person suffers from some form of PTSD.

Furthermore, Godzilla is not a mere metaphor here. He might personify the horrors of war that have returned to haunt Koichi, but he’s also a giant, god-like beast that decimates the city and explodes naval cruisers with atomic breath. Unlike in most of the recent Godzilla movies and most of the Toho films, Godzilla is not a hero here. You’re not supposed to cheer as he fights three-headed dragons or giant moths. Rather, he’s an avatar of war’s hatred and destruction, a demonic reptilian menace who acts as a living, breathing reminder of death, and who’s come to haunt the lives of these war-torn people. This film’s Godzilla is evil and terrifying, a refreshingly nasty monster in a film culture enamoured of rehabilitating monsters.

The film’s action scenes are also clearly constructed and invigorating. The opening appearance of Godzilla happens almost immediately once the film starts and is relentless. It throws us off balance and makes him seem like a constant threat. He could strike at any time, screenplay structure be damned. The later naval confrontation scenes are even better. Like Steven Spielberg, Yamazaki sets up the stakes of each confrontation, lays out the geography, conveys his action plan, and then executes it. Yamazaki’s approach to action sequences amplifies the suspense and clarifies the action in a way a more haphazard or frenetic style of execution couldn’t. It also helps that Naoki Sato’s score swells at all the right moments, coming in with timpani to hit home Godzilla’s appearances, or falling back to a quiet simmer of ambience that amplifies the atmosphere.

In spite of its formal achievements, Godzilla Minus One is a relatively low-budget picture, made for less than $15 million, so the visual effects are not on the level of a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. However, the film is clever in its use of these effects. Some moments drape Godzilla in smoke or water, making him more akin to a natural disaster than a monster, while others play with scale and lighting to evoke the miniatures of the older films. In the end, he’s an imposing, creepy presence, even if there’s something deliberately unnatural about the wide view of him lumpering towards the water.

The entire production of Godzilla Minus One is well done. It’s the sort of coherent big scale action and drama that evokes films of the classical era. It’s straightforward in many of its choices, fairly obvious in its symbolism. Such a conventional approach suits a movie of this sort, as it wants us to invest in sympathetic characters in a fantastical situation without complicating what we should feel and when. A Godzilla movie is inherently high-concept, mainstream disaster storytelling. Yamazaki succeeds in making it a very good example of this sort of broad genre storytelling, where the big monster action and the small human drama equally hold our interest with rapt attention.

8 out of 10

Godzilla Minus One (2023, Japan)

Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki; starring Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, Kuranosuke Sakai.

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