Nearly 70 years and more than 35 films into the series, it’s a testament to the enduring appeal of a skyscraper-sized lizard that Godzilla movies can still surprise you. He may not be the most flexible nuclear-powered dinosaur, but the concept is undeniably malleable. In this century alone, we’ve seen Big G square up against an alien race of Xilians in Godzilla: Final Wars and inspire the Kafaka-esque satire of Shin Godzilla. Whatever genre perches itself on Godzilla’s spiky spine will be well cared for, which helps explain the veritable Godzilla renaissance we find ourselves in.
Godzilla Minus One, the latest in Toho Studio’s “Reiwa” era, returns Godzilla to his origins and provides a fresh take on a kaiju assaulting Tokyo. Amid a host of American “Monsterverse” films and streaming shows and the three anime Godzilla features preceding it, the quadragenarian King of the Monsters stands tall in his latest, a postwar melodrama punctuated by the series’ most thrilling monster attacks yet.
Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, Godzilla Minus One is simultaneously classical and experimental. Set between the tail-end and immediate aftermath of World War II, the film finds common threads between the past and present, harnessing Godzilla’s allegorical might for a story about survivor guilt, COVID-era political disillusionment, and, ultimately, human triumph. It’s also the rare Godzilla film where the humans are as compelling as its star.
Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot experiencing second thoughts, first meets Godzilla after failing his one suicidal mission. His guilt drives the film as he attempts to rebuild his life as a sea-based minesweeper living in the slums of Tokyo while his neighbors label him a deserter and a coward. Due to his shame, Shikishima further alienates himself by rejecting the love of his female companion, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and her unspeakably adorable daughter, Akiko (Saki Nagatani). Making a beeline from the narrow government focus of Shin Godzilla, Shikishima joins a citizen-led effort to quell the beast and heal his trauma.
Yamazaki’s austere postwar melodrama plays surprisingly well with the monster. Godzilla has rarely looked or sounded better than he does here against the striking 1940s aesthetic. Generally defined by bulky rubber suits, it is often difficult to see the monster’s genuine threat. Yet, Godzilla’s power has never felt so immediate than in this approximation of postwar Tokyo.
One could pull Godzilla out of the movie and still be left with a solid World War II drama, but you wouldn’t want to. Taking cues from American blockbusters like Jaws, Jurassic Park, and Dunkirk, Yamazaki’s varied action sequences, encompassing planes, trains, and tugboats, capture the tremendous power of Godzilla’s size and strength and the absolute terror on the ground. The monster’s deafening roars and jagged teeth tear through the film with a fury more terrifying than the 70-year-old beast has ever been. Equally effective are the close-ups of the hordes of people rushing away from his nuclear beams, providing a solid rebuttal to the horror Oppenheimer teased earlier this year.
The humans carry Godzilla Minus One toward a finale that’s a hair too crowd-pleasing by half. Star Ryunosuke Kamiki invests fully in Shikishima’s trauma in a story arc more reminiscent of Hal Ashby’s Coming Home than All Monsters Attack. Yamazaki’s script finds a surprising number of ways to play off Shikshima’s guilt, transferring his conflicting feelings of militaristic failure to his inability to kill Godzilla when he had the chance. Meanwhile, a Godzilla is ruining Noriko’s first day at work in a runaway railcar sequence that makes 2014’s Godzilla look like Nintendo 64’s Gex: Enter The Gecko. When Godzilla tears through Tokyo in the film’s most relentlessly terrifying, most showstopping sequence, the two plots fuse into a unified whole, grafting Shikishima’s political woes to Yamazaki’s feelings of government abandonment during the pandemic.
Godzilla Minus One does what all the best Godzillas strive for, successfully using Godzilla as a foundation for robust storytelling. With drama as compelling as the action, the film proudly breathes its nuclear breath so the audience can feel the heat. The old tropes, now the stuff of tired parody, return with renewed power here as Yamazaki finds the humanist message amid the rubble of a destroyed Tokyo. Godzilla Minus One might be as good as Godzilla films can be, which is to say, there’s still a lot of life left in this lizard.