Review: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Godzilla Minus One

Rating

Director

Takashi Yamakazi

Screenplay

Takashi Yamakazi

Length

2h 04m

Starring

Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, Kuranosuke Sasaki, Sae Nagatani, Mio Tanaka, Yuya Endo

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Original Preview

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Review

One year shy of its 70th anniversary, Godzilla makes a return to the big screen with a Tojo effort that makes the American renditions look like drive-in disasters in Godzilla Minus One.

At the tale end of World War II, a Japanese kamikaze pilot (Ryunosuke Kamiki) makes an emergency landing on a small mechanics’ island where he hopes no one will figure out that he’s deserted in the face of fear. His worst nightmares are realized but no one will bear witness as Godzilla strikes and kills nearly everyone on the island except our protagonist and one mechanic. As he returns home, the destruction of the war has left the country reeling and with his parents dead, he seems adrift in his shame and frustration, returning to work as a necessity.

It’s while working on a wooden fishing boat blowing up floating mines that he and his crewmates discover that Godzilla is back and will be heading for mainland Japan. They can’t stop him the first time but a crew of retired military seamen will certainly try to stop his eventual second arrival.

While the film doesn’t entirely deal with the human devastation the war caused, nor the nuclear origins of Godzilla, it paints the Japanese people as beleaguered but undeterred in rising from the devastation and preventing it from happening again. That theme succinctly frames the post-war struggle of Japanese society and its intent to rise from the ashes stronger and better. It gives the narrative added resonance even with all the monster elements that make it fit within the long history of Godzilla films.

The performances range from passive (Kamiki and Minami Hamabe as his wife) to excessive (Kuranosuke Sasaki as the gruff boat captain) with only Yuki Yamada as the young crewman who didn’t get to fight in the war due to his age striking the right balance. While those exaggerated performances fit better within a traditional Godzilla movie, this felt like it was trying to be a more crafty disaster movie than monster movie. To that end, the visual effects were largely good, though the opening sequence where Kamiki is landing on the island looked incredibly chintzy as if they wasted their budget on everything else and had to make do with the start. Beginning poorly can have its benefits but that’s a rare situation and this wasn’t one of them.

Godzilla Minus One, in spite of its flaws, is an enjoyable film that hits its beats nearly perfectly, eliciting emotion with careful precision. The king of monster/disaster films remains such in his latest outing. While it might not be the dramatic interpretation we should have gotten, it’s still immensely entertaining.