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GODZILLA MINUS ONE
Director: Takashi Yamazaki Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, Kuranosuke Sasaki,, Mio Tanaka, Yuya Endo, Kisuke Iida, Sae Nagatani MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 2:05 Release Date: 12/1/23 |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 30, 2023 Godzilla has been an unstoppable force in movies for almost 70 years now, and it's quite the accomplishment that a gargantuan, atomic dinosaur monster might be the most famous and enduring of international movie stars. That's especially true since, for most of the big guy's history and filmography, that monster has been depicted by someone in a rubber suit. As has been the case in recent depictions of the giant creature (both in movies from its homeland and in several American ones), there's no one in a rubber suit in Godzilla Minus One, even though writer/director Takashi Yamazaki brings the monster and the basic story of it back to their roots in this newest entry in the 33-movie franchise (not counting those American ones). It technically goes back to before the roots of the original 1954 film, which saw Godzilla as a metaphor for and a warning against nuclear weapons. The notion of the only country to suffer attacks from such weapons making such a dire and cathartic statement—less than a decade after the United States dropped atomic bombs on two of its cities—still feels daring 69 years later. Godzilla's longevity and continuing popularity make a good case for the power of the metaphor in general—and, in a world that's still grappling with the potential of nuclear war or annihilation, this particular metaphor specifically. Yamazaki's film begins in the final days of World War II and carries on a bit more than a year after the war's end. There's no imagery of or direct reference to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for reasons that are probably too obvious to state outright. The film doesn't need such depictions or citations, anyway. When Godzilla unleashes his atomic breath on a district in Tokyo, the resulting explosion, shockwave, and mushroom cloud, which the monster looks upon almost in awe of its own astonishing power, make the point horrifically clear. There is a lot of horror in this new film, and a lot of that comes from how closely Yamazaki's screenplay sticks to the fundamental concept, the plot, and even some close quotations of scenes from the '54 original. Godzilla isn't a villain here, and the creature definitely isn't the hero it would become in a good number of those sequels, when some other giant monster posed a threat to it or its territory. It simply exists as a biological wrecking machine—swimming under and chomping upon boats and ships of various sizes that get in its way, plodding through the streets of the city to topple buildings in front of it and not noticing the people it crushes underfoot, chomping at anything that it might mistake for food or instinctually take to be a threat. Those scenes, which are few and far between in this film, are what we expect from a movie featuring this monster. It's to the credit of Yamazaki, who also served as the film's visual effects supervisor, that the spectacle of these sequences remains in a terrified, helpless register. Godzilla moves slowly along his path of destruction, and the joke, perhaps, is that obviously the 70-year-old monster—much, much older, of course, within the world of the film—would look as if it's a bit arthritic. The actual terror, though, is that everyone can see this beast coming from miles away but is hopeless to stop it. Most of the story, as we also have come to expect from these movies, revolves around the humans living through, trying to survive, and working out a way to stop the chaotic devastation. That part of the story is thoughtfully considered here, focusing on Kōichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a pilot who abandons a kamikaze mission and is too frightened to shoot a smaller Godzilla when it attacks a repair unit on an isolated island, and Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who survived the U.S. bombing raids on Tokyo and now acts as the mother to an orphaned baby girl. In the aftermath of the war, the three become a makeshift family, although Kōichi is filled with too much grief, guilt, and remorse to consider making them a real one. Eventually, Godzilla returns, being awakened by a U.S. nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll, and, after Kōichi and some fellow minesweepers—as well as a Japanese cruiser—fail to stop the monster's progress, makes landfall on Tokyo. It's a lot bigger, and a disarmed Japan doesn't have the military equipment to stage a proper fight against the creature, while the United States doesn't want to provoke the potential ire of the Soviet Union by offering its own support. The ensuing sequence has been discussed enough already in this review, so it's probably best to stick to the human element that makes up the bulk of the narrative. It's melodramatic, of course, but appropriately mournful, but the clever part of latter portion of Yamazaki's plot is how it subverts our expectations to get at a message of humanity—the collaboration of people for survival and the necessity of saving even one person to stay true to the virtue of that goal. We anticipate yet another battle with Godzilla in yet another sequence of citywide chaos, but here, the whole point of the ultimate plan is to prevent such a destructive climax. It's quite an accomplishment for a series—not to mention for the whole genre it helped spawn—that often seems to cram human characters into these stories without much thought and as a way to pass the time between the next monster attacks. In Godzilla Minus One, the human characters, as well as humanity in general, truly matter as more than victims of Godzilla's feet, teeth, and fiery breath. Copyright © 2023 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for creature violence and action)
