Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
B + Movie: Review of Godzilla Minus One
Godzilla has been around as long as—well, the dinosaur, and he has managed to stick around longer than the in-laws at Thanksgiving dinner. Over the years, the big green boy has entertained us by battling adversaries like King Kong, Mothra, Ghidora, Ebirah, Gigan, Hedora (the smog monster—really), Mechagodzilla (a robot Godzilla), and many others.
Godzilla is not simply a garden variety movie monster. He is a franchise who has appeared in over thirty films produced by a number of film studios including Toho, the Japanese media giant, The Legendary Company, along with other Hollywood entities, as well as having lately appeared in Anime productions, over the last seventy years. He has gone through as many iterations as one might expect having starred in thirty movies produced by a wide spectrum of studios—even more than Spiderman.
Godzilla has been portrayed as everything from a mindless natural disaster ravaging coastal cities, as in Godzilla Minus 1 or the original 1954 film, to a savior of mankind. In the 2014 version of Godzilla, part of Legendary Film’s Monsterverse franchise, he is mysteriously drawn to battle a pair of Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms, or MUTOs in San Francisco as they rendezvous to mate. Whether by coincidence or through some unfathomable natural intent, Godzilla does battle with the MUTOs and manages to save mankind in this Hollywood version—just as he does in many of the other Toho productions.
What is the audience attraction for this gigantic fire-breathing creature that is sometimes the savior of humanity and sometimes its bane and sometimes completely apathetic towards it? At times, he is threatening and downright scary, blindly destructive, or just plain downright hokey—especially in the Godzilla and son sequences. He will befriend—or at least share an affinity—with some humans, usually children. He has been depicted through CGI, by actors in suits, or other more primitive forms of animation. In short, Godzilla offers something for everyone. Of course, he’s had over seventy years to give voice to all these iterations.
Godzilla Minus 1, the latest production from Toho Studios, is an interesting amalgam of the various Godzilla sensibilities. It is a throwback—and a tribute—to the first films of the franchise as well as being an historical snapshot of post-World War II Japan and a social commentary on nuclear warfare. It reminds me of the Godzilla movies I used to see at the drive-in theater when I was a kid. It has a lot of qualities of those B movies but stretches the envelope of that genre with its context of Japanese post-war devastation and national awareness and its cautionary tale of nuclear holocaust—making it a B+ movie.
The film opens as a Zero fighter lands on a ravaged runway on a remote Pacific island runway during the waning days of World War II. The Pilo, Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) claims that the plane is malfunctioning, but the head mechanic Tachinaba (Manuteka Aoki) can find nothing wrong and realizes Shikishima is trying to evade his duty as a kamikaze pilot. That night, the outpost is attacked by Godzilla and Shikishima freezes instead of shooting the creature. All except him and Tachibana are killed.
Disgraced by being a surviving kamikaze, Shikishima returns home where he discovers his family has been killed during Allied bombings. He is totured with guilt and is ashamed of being a survivor of the conlict. He accidentally meets a young woman Noriko (Minami Himabi) and a baby she has rescued. Against his better judgement, he allows them to stay at his parent’s home. He eventually gets a job on a minesweeper recovering naval mines and starts rebuilding his life when the nuclear blast at the Bikini atoll empowers Godzilla who begins attacking ships.
Shikishima and the crew are ordered to stall Godzilla’s progress however they can and they manage to hold him up long enough for the cruiser Takao to attack the beast. Godzilla demolishes it in short order and continues toward Tokyo. One of Shikishima’s crewmates Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a former naval weapons engineer, devises a plan to destroy Godzilla using freon tanks to first sink and then float him, thereby destroying him with abrupt changes in water pressure. Because the country has been demilitarized, it is up to civilian volunteers to enact Noda’s plan. Shikishima volunteers to distract Godzilla by flying at him in a fighter plane, hoping to redeem himself as a defender of Japan.
Godzilla Minus One is a bit of a paradox. It is a little disappointing but somehow also rises above expectations. And sometimes it can’t seem to decide who Godzilla really is. In the first attack sequence, when Godzilla goes after the airplane mechanics at the outpost, he attacks them individually, chomping them and throwing them away like dead rats. It is much less typical of the Godzilla genre and seems to rely much more on a sort of Jurassic Park vibe. Of course, this is a younger, smaller Godzilla, so maybe he doesn’t quite have his chops down yet.
Later, when Godzilla attacks the cruiser, his body type, and his eyes, are very reminiscent of the earliest versions (the body suits) of the monster. His legs are heavier and compared to the earlier more CGI type version, he seems much more of a throwback. Of course, this could be explained away as a result of radioactive mutations from the Bikini atoll.
Aside from Godzilla’s appearance, the film stays true to its B-movie roots by plucking the heartstrings of the audience with sickly sweet melodramatic plot turns. Shikishima’s anguish and alienation is overwritten, overacted, and just plain overdone. His self-loathing will not allow him to consummate his relationship with Noriko or acknowledge their child, which is plausible, but writer and director Takashi Yamazaki’s heavy-handed treatment of this characterization, and his stereotypical depiction of many Japanese archetypes, including the stern neighbor lady with the heart of gold, the cynical and world-weary boat captain, and the overly enthusiastic crewman, are–to be generous—predictable. And the schmaltzy ending is straight out of a B movie, or a Hollywood happy ending.
When Godzilla Minus 1 approaches the themes of nuclear annihilation or the reclamation of post-war Japanese national identity, it stretches our expectations of a Godzilla movie, and we can continue to expect further forays into new territory for this venerable old friend of ours. The 2014 Godzilla left many of the Toho traditions behind. He was a CGI improved Americanized version. While Godzilla Minus 1 acknowledges the legacy and heritage of Godzilla, it tries—not quite successfully—to make this creature more than a dinosaur.
It will be interesting to see what Toho and Legacy Films Monarch: Legacy of Monsters has in store for us. All we know for sure is that Godzilla is no dinosaur.