Godzilla Minus One

I've never been big into kaiju movies, and the why behind it is, admittedly, contradictory. On the one hand, I've never been interested in the human side of the movies. They always felt like a necessary evil to me, providing little purpose beyond "we can't have 90 minutes of JUST monsters". But I'm often bored by the monster portions and disaster porn too. There's only so many times I can see a big creature knock over an apartment building before it feels redundant. And I certainly don't care to watch two monsters fighting; if I want to see scripted fighting, WWE is right there. So when I heard how Godzilla Minus One was this revelation, and saw it appearing not only in top 10 lists for the year, from critics I respect, and sometimes at the TOP of the list, I was curious. Apprehensive, but curious. I couldn't imagine what they could possibly do to make a Godzilla movie so amazing. Well, I'm here to tell you I am eating a snow shovel full of crow today. Godzilla Minus One's reputation is earned. This isn't a great Godzilla movie. This is a great movie, full stop. It just so happens to have a 20,000 ton radioactive dinosaur in it. GM1's formula for success boils down to two elements. The first is the more simple one: this is a horror movie. Not the blood-and-guts kind, but the embodiment of the word horror. Panic, fear, the kind of terror that paralyzes a person. That is what GM1 is going for. This movie is presented at the ground level. You see the human cost of his carnage. He is a menace, an unprecedented threat attacking a country still reeling from being defeated in historical and devastating fashion in World War 2. There is nothing to cheer for when Godzilla destroys a town that has spent two years rebuilding and is now functional again. There is no cathartic thrill when it hurls a boat trying to remove mines from a nearby harbor. Godzilla is presented as not just a monster, but a near-impossible one, in many ways. Not only is he a danger to human life and a psychological terror, he's also a logistical one: Japan's air force is mothballed, and it can't risk naval combat without stepping into and inflaming the tensions between the US and Russia. The Japanese government doesn't even want to admit Godzilla is real. The people of the town Godzilla first attacks are basically on their own. That last element feeds into the other secret to this movie's success, which is what it does with the human element. On the macro level, Japan's national identity, humiliation, and mourning all play a major role in GM1. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are never mentioned directly, but they don't have to be; Japan losing the war at all is enough of a profound loss to speak volumes. Nobody wants to face war and devastation and loss of life again. There's a moment when the civilian force is ready to mobilize and the head scientist gives a speech to raise spirits. He talks about how nobody wants to do this, but they have to, but not for Japan. He excoriates the Japanese government for their policy of not valuing human life during the war, calling out cheap armor on tanks and refusing to put ejector seats in planes, and he says fighting Godzilla will be different because it won't be a fight to the death but a fight for life. As much as it is about people fighting a nuclear lizard, GM1 is also about a country healing itself. On the micro level, the movie follows Koichi, who in the final days of the war was supposed to run a kamikaze mission, but couldn't bring himself to do it and faked a plane malfunction to land at a repair station. He first encounters Godzilla there, and is one of only two survivors. He carries with his shame from not fulfilling his mission, and is looked upon as a coward by survivors of his hometown, who blame his cowardice for not winning the war. He encounters Noriko, a young woman to whom a baby, Akiko, has been entrusted. They live together but never marry or even date, because Koichi cannot escape his shame and regret. For him, the war is not over, because he failed in his duty, living when he should be dead. GM1 uses the time spent with him and his co-workers and Nokiko to examine the individual cost of being on the losing side of war, the PTSD and survivor's guilt that comes with it, and what that can do to a person and the people around him. One might think this is wasted time in a movie about humans versus a 100 foot tall fire-breathing gecko, but that goes back to what I said in the intro: this is not a movie about Godzilla. This is a movie that uses Godzilla in post-war Japan to examine the cost of war, the trauma of losing a war but surviving it, the loss of identity at both an personal and cultural scale, and how both a person and a country can move on and heal. The slower, more emotional moments are what make this movie the success that it is. I'm a white boy, and I was born 30 years after WW2, so I have no perspective on it but historical, but GM1 was able to effectively and emotionally communicate the pain and mental anguish of the Japanese people in that time. I felt for Koichi, because the movie slowed down and allowed me to do so. I felt for Nokiko, who so very much wants to make the three of them a family, but Koichi's scars stand in the way. The humans are the most important element in this movie, and they give them all sufficient time to be fully realized people with lives and loves and hopes and fears, so that when the big green guy comes in and levels the city, you feel the horror of the situation. You don't want to see these people get trampled or thrown around. Godzilla isn't cool; he's towering death, hurting people who doesn't deserve it. I never thought I'd see the day where a Godzilla movie would be so amazing, but director Takashi Yamazaki cracked the formula. He made the humans and their stories matter. Instead of "Godzilla destroys a town" or "Godzilla protects a town from a space mutant fish koala bird", he flipped it around. "People and town ravaged by a savage monster". He presented Godzilla as a threat to humanity, and showed the cost of his destructive force at the ground level, and he didn't dumb it down and turn it into a blockbuster. Every moment of this feels real and looks amazing and lived up to the hype. This is the kind of movie where, when someone says "I don't like that kind of movie", you show them this and wait for them to say "well, I was wrong". I should know, because I'm one of them.