For the thirtieth time in nearly seven decades* Toho’s greatest contract player has risen from the murky depths of the western Pacific to haunt not only the domestic Japanese market, but the humble regional American multiplex as well. The franchise truly springs eternal with Godzilla Minus One, the first film to be distributed in the United States under the reformed Toho International banner and the first of the series in my filmgoing life to see this wide of a distribution. The latest frolic for the king of the monsters has hustled up quite the collection in its 2,300+ screen opening weekend, netting just south of $12 million over those three days. It may not be Marvel money (though even Marvel money isn’t really Marvel money anymore), but for a conservatively budgeted foreign series that has struggled since the 1990s to find any real theatrical foothold in this country, it’s not a bad take at all.
* This does not include Toho’s triplet of futuristic animated features, Legendary’s various Monsterverse properties or Roland Emerich’s ill-received 1998 outing.
The film, to borrow Toho’s own enigmatic catch copy, takes both Godzilla and Japan “into the minus”, back some nine years from the events of the original 1954 film, to the final days of the war in the Pacific. There we are introduced to Zero pilot Koichi Shikishima, who feigns engine failure to shirk his suicidal “special attack” orders and makes a landing at the Imperial Navy’s remote outpost on Odo Island. Shortly thereafter he and the field mechanics stationed on Odo are set upon by a large and violent dinosaur-like creature, a mysterious rover of the deep sea dubbed Godzilla by island legends. Given the opportunity to fight and possibly kill the monster with his Zero’s 20mm auto-cannons, Shikishima instead chokes, with results both immediate and deadly for his compatriots.
A few months later the war is over and Shikishima has returned to Japan, where he scrabbles together a living in a shanty town that has sprung up in the firebombed ruins of metropolitan Tokyo. At the market he encounters Noriko Oishi, a young woman who has turned to petty theft to support the orphaned baby Akiko, whom she has taken into her care. Two years pass. Shikishima and Noriko live together in a state of co-dependent platonic inertia, caring for the now-toddler Akiko. Wracked with survivor’s guilt and unable to move on from the trauma of the war, Shikishima takes on the well-paid and dangerous work of sweeping sea mines along the Japanese coastline. Meanwhile Noriko, unsatisfied with her dependence on Shikishima and the lack of progress within their relationship, finds an office job in Tokyo’s bustling Ginza district.
Unbeknownst to anyone a legendary creature is lurking. Grown to massive size and imbued with untold destructive potential and cancerous regenerative capabilities by an American undersea atomic experiment, a monstrous Godzilla sets its sights on Tokyo just as it is beginning to rebuild.
While plenty of series entries have been set in the future, both near and far-flung, director and screenwriter Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is the first to set itself entirely in the past, and it anchors itself assuredly in the aesthetics of the immediate postwar period. The shanty towns and street markets of decimated Tokyo are intimately and convincingly realized with practical sets, while the broad streets and brick-and-concrete modernity of Ginza and the surrounding details of the recuperating mid-1940s metropolis are lovingly rendered with visual effects (by Shirogumi Inc., under the supervision of Yamazaki and the direction of his long-time collaborator Kiyoko Shibuya). Likewise for the vehicles of the period, a mix of practical and VFX iterations of decommissioned warships, commuter trains, and the film’s humble mecha highlight, the experimental fighter plane Shinden. Even Godzilla’s mutation is tied to a specific historic moment by way of a visual effects reconstruction of the Crossroads-Baker atomic shot from the Summer of 1946, the radioactive contamination from which was so widespread (and decontamination strategies so lacking) that plans for a third shot in the Operation Crossroads series, Crossroads-Charlie, were abandoned.
Curious in its absence, then, is an obvious political perspective. Comparisons to Shigeru Kayama’s highly political writing for the first Godzilla (the serialized novel of which was recently translated and published in English) are perhaps unavoidable, given the parity in setting and subject and the degree to which Yamazaki derived inspiration from the 1954 film, but such comparisons inevitably fall flat. Godzilla Minus Zero, despite the potentiality of its setting, is deliberately shorn of any complicating elements. Yamazaki writes any American involvement, and indeed the whole of the occupation of Japan, out of the film with a montage in faux-newsreel style (the stylistic sibling to the opening of Gareth Edwards 2014 Godzilla), and makes reference to contemporaneous Japanese politics in only the broadest of strokes. There is fertile ground yet for anyone wishing to explore Godzilla through the lens of the postwar Japanese experience, and from a variety of socio-political perspectives. Yamazaki’s film is not that, though in all fairness it isn’t trying to be.
Despite the emphasis on period trappings Godzilla Minus One feels every bit what it is — the first Godzilla film of the post-Covid era. A film in which a community surrounded by and engulfed in deathly circumstance comes together in defense of life and the future. To that end Yamazaki deliberately culls the film of many traditional kaiju eiga trappings – politics, politicians, military engagement and boundary-pushing super-science. There are no Doctors Yamane or Serizawa here, no professor Tadokoro to read a new book and learn so much, just an assortment of private citizens with past experience of dubious applicability from their tenure in the Imperial forces. Military responses to Godzilla’s arrival are anemic and ineffectual, futile efforts by a defeated and decommissioned service that serve only to antagonize the monster in their brief appearances. Government bureaucracy, the major focus of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s 2016 hit Shin Godzilla, is absent entirely. “Just like the government to keep secrets,” becomes a common refrain as the civilians of Godzilla Minus One realize they’ve been left to their own devices to resolve the impossible crisis before them.
That Yamazaki reserves the film’s small cynicisms for the powers that be after nearly half a decade of living under varying degrees of pandemic mismanagement seems fitting enough. He has otherwise crafted the most sentimental Godzilla in decades, if not the entire history of the franchise — an accusation I levy with no pejorative intent. Godzilla Minus One suggests that the most potent weapons available to us in our ongoing battle against entropy, tragedy, governmental shortcomings and universal ambivalence are hope, friendship, family and community. There’s a lot to admire in that after several of the worst and most isolating years of many of our lives. If ever there was a moment for Godzilla to be defeated by the sheer indomitability of the human spirit, it was this one.
Despite a preoccupation with special effects, which first attracted Yamazaki to filmmaking nearly four decades ago, I feel that it’s in ground-level human melodrama that the director has always found the most success. Godzilla Minus Zero is no exception, reflecting the deft hand the director has demonstrated with such material from the very beginning. Shikishima makes for an immediately compelling and relatable protagonist, stunted in his waking life and haunted in his dreams by the death he feels he should have suffered in the Pacific war and psychologically unable to escape the wartime that was to live in the future that is. Godzilla, then, becomes the metaphorical embodiment of Shikishima’s unresolved trauma and guilt, his unshakable fatalism, and the literal death that awaits him in the theater that claimed so many of his comrades. There in the depths it lurks, and like an untreated cancer it festers and metastasizes, the threat of its catastrophic revelation omnipresent and ever growing.
As one fatal thread binds Shikishima to Godzilla, and death, so another binds him to Noriko, and life. She builds an unconventional family with Shikishima and their adopted daughter Akiko, a curious nuclear unit of alienated individuals in a city where only isolated survivors remain. The community around them soon becomes their extended family — Shikishima’s congenial co-workers become like doting uncles, while his older neighbor Sumiko, her own children lost in the same firebombings that claimed Shikishima’s parents, gradually takes on the role of adoptive grandmother.
It’s enough, along with Noriko’s support through his darkest moments, for positive desires to take root in Shikishima once more. But just as hope buds within him Godzilla surfaces anew to raze Ginza, reducing the emblem of Postwar Japanese prosperity to rubble and ash and atomizing the National Diet Building. And so Shikishima finds himself once more at a crossroads, with Noriko literally pushing him towards life even as a deadly confrontation with Godzilla seems inevitable…
I’ll admit to not being entirely conducive to what Yamazaki, et al, were doing with Godzilla Minus One when I first saw it. It’s been a rough year for me, for reasons that have nothing to do with the mental health issues I’ve written about elsewhere or the lingering frustrations of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I suppose I wanted, consciously or otherwise, a film that reflected that frame of mind. Godzilla Minus One, steeped in nostalgia and optimism and punctuated with lovingly produced theme-park action sequences, does not. With a few days’ hindsight and a good deal of thought, whatever resentments I initially held have softened and my appreciation for the film has grown, to the extent that I may go for another screening before it exits my local cinema this Thursday. To put that in its proper perspective, Godzilla Minus One is the first film I’ve seen in a theater since 2016. Wanting to see it twice is high praise.
In many respects Godzilla Minus One has sought to differentiate itself, especially from the franchise’s more recent past. It is the antithesis of the excellent Shin Godzilla, which is probably exactly what it needed to be to follow in that film’s considerable cultural footsteps. Yamazaki presents a comparatively simple story with good characters, a digestible moral throughline, and a show-reel worthy selection of genuinely spectacular kaiju set pieces, and does so in a manner that honors the long-passed golden age of Toho tokusatsu production while confidently treading its own path — no mean feat, that.
Yamazaki has been public about his desire to have another go at the Godzilla franchise now that Godzilla Minus One is in release. Despite whatever reservations I’ve had about his work in the past (and there have been plenty, going all the way back to Returner in 2002) I think Toho’s executives would be stupid, bordering on irresponsible, not to give it to him. Good job.