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Godzilla Minus One
Period Kaiju / Japanese / 2023
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've seen some exceptionally positive reviews for this movie from Western critics and trailer looks kinda cool. Godzilla looks way better in this one than he did in Shin Godzilla and it's a postwar period piece which is pretty different from what I've come to expect from these movies.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I've just come back from seeing this movie in-theater. It was being shown dubbed at a great time so I figured seeing a kaiju movie on the big screen would be a pretty good way to experience what seemed like a pretty promising movie. This is the first time I've seen a new movie in theaters since Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I am only now realizing was 8 years ago.
Sadly, movie theaters seem to have heavily fallen out of favor recently and I was 1 of only 3 people at my screening. I can't blame other people too much though, the tickets were twice what I thought I'd have to pay. I guess they were only showing this movie in the big cushy heated seats with footrests and a display the stretched the edges of the frame across the adjacent walls to feign an IMAX experience.
Frankly, I'd have settled for fewer features for cheaper tickets and the theater experience itself seemed a bit wasted in this case because this is not the epic monster slugfest of the Legendary Godzilla films.
Which reminds me, I feel like I have to caveat my opinions by stating that I have not seen the original Godzilla, let alone many of it's most popular installments. I grew up with a VHS copy of Godzilla 2000, which I personally assume to be a decent entry point into the series... while also being very aware that the Tri-Star Godzilla which I also had was popularly maligned both on release and for years to come.
It makes me feel like I haven't enough proper Toho Godzilla movies, which is funny because while I'm preoccupied with the fact that I've seen the last three Legendary Godzilla movies up to date, it hasn't really occurred to me that I've also seen the last three live-action Toho Godzillas; Godzilla Minus One, Shin Godzilla, and... Godzilla Final Wars.
These three movies are so wildly disparate in their production quality, tone, and overall goals, it's weird to think that any one of them can really individually capture what Godzilla is as a series.
BUT, I'd like to open the review proper by offering a hypothesis of what I think an ideal Godzilla movie could be.
Now I have to preface this by conceding up front that there are at least two significantly different roles that Godzilla plays in the movies he features in.
The first is the VILLAIN, as he was originally portrayed, a monster-of-the-week, a vague incarnation of nuclear war visited upon Tokyo. The second is the HERO, or ANTI-HERO, in which Godzilla protects Tokyo by proxy through fighting and defeating an even greater threat, or even as an explicitly benevolent force.
In movies where Godzilla plays a hero, it's virtually always a monster vs. monster affair, and the intended appeal of the movie is the spectacle of the fight itself.
But what if we want to portray Godzilla as he originally was? By 50s standards, Godzilla may well have been a legitimately frightening presence on-screen, but that's just not going to fly today. Shin Godzilla also attempted this by redesigning him to look overtly evil and incorporating various forms of body horror, though eventually succumbed to presenting him as a very stiff upright creature, reminiscent of the range of motion costumed actors used to have.
You could present Godzilla similar to how he appears in the Legendary films, as a fully articulated CG giant, but seeing the devastation he can wreak in those films really only serves to thrill the audience, not demoralize them, or scare them, or otherwise associate Godzilla any of the oppressively negative feelings that the actual cast is supposed to be experiencing.
Perhaps the biggest weakness across all of the Godzilla movies I've watched is the throughline of a human arc, that there are human characters on the ground experiencing the disaster first-hand. It's difficult to reconcile that human-centric obligation with Godzilla just being ****ing cool.
THUS is my theory, and potentially the entire impetus for this movie:
Godzilla needs to represent something.
Suppose we follow Main Guy, it's the end of World War II, and he's deserted his duty as a kamikaze pilot. The war ends in a decisive defeat and he returns home to find his family dead, his home in ruins, and is haunted by his own cowardice.
During this time, Godzilla grows from a benign lizard into an ecological predator, and eventually mutates through exposure to America's nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll into the gargantuan living warhead that eventually attacks Japan.
Godzilla's attacks threaten the well-being of what family Main Guy's managed to assemble in the wake of the war and he finds himself once again confronted by his own cowardice.
The key here is that Godzilla isn't just a monster, but a living, persistent representation of the war itself. He's a literal product of weaponry and his growth, persistence, and oppression reflects the war's post-traumatic effects on Main Guy.
You could think of Godzilla as a sort of Paranoia Agent, which is also a (much more subtle) postwar commentary on human behavior. He's functionally a manifestation of human fallibility, and the destruction he causes is in some way karma for a mistakes we don't want to accept.
The problem is I don't like to headcanon out the flaws of the movies I see, so while I'm willing to accept that this may very well have been the intended read of the movie, I gotta admit they disappointed me.
My two biggest issues with this movie is that they don't take the time to let this idea simmer and build organically, and they just can't deliver on the emotional gutpunch they're trying so hard to evoke.
I appreciate that they give us a taste of Godzilla, by having him attack and slaughter an airbase in a smaller pre-nuclear form, wherein he is only known by locals. He also demonstrates a sort of violence that I really haven't seen from any of the Godzillas since the Tri-Star movie, wherein he's basically just a big dinosaur that will happily stomp and eat people.
The conventional Godzilla really only seems to kill people by proxy; either by destroying buildings or vehicles people are in or around, or by retaliating against military weapons, so it's strange to see him crushing swathes of humans underfoot and snapping up individual people like the T-Rexs from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
That said, this movie feels so much like they skimmed the Godzilla development I mentioned above that there really isn't even a third act. There's the very brief intro in which Main Guy deserts the war and fails to intervene in Godzilla destroying the airbase, then we fast forward to him getting a platonic family and Godzilla attacking shore for the first time post-nuclear tests, then the rest of the movie is just THE PLAN to kill Godzilla, and executing the plan.
I really think this movie could have benefited from more Godzilla earlier, before he develops his nuclear breath, perhaps he's a recurring menace to the shores and each time he appears Main Guy just falls deeper into hopelessness. By the time of Godzilla's first appearance on the mainland, he can already produce the functional equivalent of a nuclear warhead, so there really isn't that slow burn or threat build-up that a story like this really needs.
Also all the grief that the characters are supposed to be experiencing falls just shy of being believable. Main Guy has an annoying case of Anime Angst, where he's just unrealistically non-communicative and lashes out in what seem like breaks from his character.
There are also multiple scenes in which he and other characters are screaming or crying, but there isn't a single teardrop in sight. These are the driest cheeks in Japan and these are supposed to be sad moments, but the one child actor is very obviously acting, and the actual actors don't have the benefit of a simple ****ing eyedropper so they can fake some ******* tears.
The final twist of the movie is the reveal that Main Girl actually didn't die offscreen (which was one of multiple predictable plot points), and she looks perfectly fine and is just sitting upright in bed wearing unstained bandages and a sling. The movie teases some weird black thing creeping under her skin which relates to literally NOTHING that I'm aware of, so all this scene really does is take me out of the moment by presenting me three characters, who should all be weeping in each others arms, but for the fact that
one of them is a child is hasn't been directed to act sad,
one of them is a man who can't look convincingly sad on camera,
and one of them is an allegedly injured woman with no visible injuries who's been directed to sit perfectly still in bed instead of embracing her family which we've just implied will finally be reunited, married, and free of Godzilla.
The intended emotion just isn't there.
And it sucks because I thought Godzilla looked pretty cool in this too. They used his classic theme to good effect, and his classic roar, and an otherwise minimalistic score does a good job of evoking tension and sadness... It's just hard to appreciate the sad moments, and Godzilla kinda blows his load too early.
The plan to kill Godzilla comes down to a scheme to saddle him with freon gas canisters to sink him to a crushing ocean depth, which sounds plausible enough, but the "Plan B" is to use rapid inflatables to bring him back to surface and kill him with the bends, which doesn't make any ****ing sense to me.
If a sudden 1800 meter depth worth of pressure isn't enough to kill something, why would rapidly decompressing it do anything? Aren't you just applying the same amount of force in two different directions? The describe the effect this has on Godzilla as "damage" which kinda communicates how little thought actually went into this idea.
Great idea to bring your certain death back to the surface where it can kill you. At least it produced a kinda sick-looking visual when it results in a zombie-like Godzilla 'bout to fire muh lazer.
This movie ends by of course teasing that Godzilla's not actually dead before dropping title on us: "G: Minus One", which is such a dumb name for this movie especially once you've seen it and realize literally nothing in the movie explains the reason for the name.
I think it's poorly explained in a marketing blurb I've seen about how postwar Japan had been "reduced to zero" and therefor adding Godzilla makes it "MINUS ONE", which just so cheesy it sounds like something a child would think up.
Obviously it'd be much more forgivable if the movie was actually really good, but it ended up as just a capstone on what felt like 80% of the way to an actually solid movie.
At least the CG was way better than that Furiosa trailer.
Final Verdict: [Okay]
Godzilla Minus One
Period Kaiju / Japanese / 2023
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've seen some exceptionally positive reviews for this movie from Western critics and trailer looks kinda cool. Godzilla looks way better in this one than he did in Shin Godzilla and it's a postwar period piece which is pretty different from what I've come to expect from these movies.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
I've just come back from seeing this movie in-theater. It was being shown dubbed at a great time so I figured seeing a kaiju movie on the big screen would be a pretty good way to experience what seemed like a pretty promising movie. This is the first time I've seen a new movie in theaters since Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which I am only now realizing was 8 years ago.
Sadly, movie theaters seem to have heavily fallen out of favor recently and I was 1 of only 3 people at my screening. I can't blame other people too much though, the tickets were twice what I thought I'd have to pay. I guess they were only showing this movie in the big cushy heated seats with footrests and a display the stretched the edges of the frame across the adjacent walls to feign an IMAX experience.
Frankly, I'd have settled for fewer features for cheaper tickets and the theater experience itself seemed a bit wasted in this case because this is not the epic monster slugfest of the Legendary Godzilla films.
Which reminds me, I feel like I have to caveat my opinions by stating that I have not seen the original Godzilla, let alone many of it's most popular installments. I grew up with a VHS copy of Godzilla 2000, which I personally assume to be a decent entry point into the series... while also being very aware that the Tri-Star Godzilla which I also had was popularly maligned both on release and for years to come.
It makes me feel like I haven't enough proper Toho Godzilla movies, which is funny because while I'm preoccupied with the fact that I've seen the last three Legendary Godzilla movies up to date, it hasn't really occurred to me that I've also seen the last three live-action Toho Godzillas; Godzilla Minus One, Shin Godzilla, and... Godzilla Final Wars.
These three movies are so wildly disparate in their production quality, tone, and overall goals, it's weird to think that any one of them can really individually capture what Godzilla is as a series.
BUT, I'd like to open the review proper by offering a hypothesis of what I think an ideal Godzilla movie could be.
Now I have to preface this by conceding up front that there are at least two significantly different roles that Godzilla plays in the movies he features in.
The first is the VILLAIN, as he was originally portrayed, a monster-of-the-week, a vague incarnation of nuclear war visited upon Tokyo. The second is the HERO, or ANTI-HERO, in which Godzilla protects Tokyo by proxy through fighting and defeating an even greater threat, or even as an explicitly benevolent force.
In movies where Godzilla plays a hero, it's virtually always a monster vs. monster affair, and the intended appeal of the movie is the spectacle of the fight itself.
But what if we want to portray Godzilla as he originally was? By 50s standards, Godzilla may well have been a legitimately frightening presence on-screen, but that's just not going to fly today. Shin Godzilla also attempted this by redesigning him to look overtly evil and incorporating various forms of body horror, though eventually succumbed to presenting him as a very stiff upright creature, reminiscent of the range of motion costumed actors used to have.
You could present Godzilla similar to how he appears in the Legendary films, as a fully articulated CG giant, but seeing the devastation he can wreak in those films really only serves to thrill the audience, not demoralize them, or scare them, or otherwise associate Godzilla any of the oppressively negative feelings that the actual cast is supposed to be experiencing.
Perhaps the biggest weakness across all of the Godzilla movies I've watched is the throughline of a human arc, that there are human characters on the ground experiencing the disaster first-hand. It's difficult to reconcile that human-centric obligation with Godzilla just being ****ing cool.
THUS is my theory, and potentially the entire impetus for this movie:
Godzilla needs to represent something.
Suppose we follow Main Guy, it's the end of World War II, and he's deserted his duty as a kamikaze pilot. The war ends in a decisive defeat and he returns home to find his family dead, his home in ruins, and is haunted by his own cowardice.
During this time, Godzilla grows from a benign lizard into an ecological predator, and eventually mutates through exposure to America's nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll into the gargantuan living warhead that eventually attacks Japan.
Godzilla's attacks threaten the well-being of what family Main Guy's managed to assemble in the wake of the war and he finds himself once again confronted by his own cowardice.
The key here is that Godzilla isn't just a monster, but a living, persistent representation of the war itself. He's a literal product of weaponry and his growth, persistence, and oppression reflects the war's post-traumatic effects on Main Guy.
You could think of Godzilla as a sort of Paranoia Agent, which is also a (much more subtle) postwar commentary on human behavior. He's functionally a manifestation of human fallibility, and the destruction he causes is in some way karma for a mistakes we don't want to accept.
At least that's what I like to think this movie was going for.
The problem is I don't like to headcanon out the flaws of the movies I see, so while I'm willing to accept that this may very well have been the intended read of the movie, I gotta admit they disappointed me.
My two biggest issues with this movie is that they don't take the time to let this idea simmer and build organically, and they just can't deliver on the emotional gutpunch they're trying so hard to evoke.
I appreciate that they give us a taste of Godzilla, by having him attack and slaughter an airbase in a smaller pre-nuclear form, wherein he is only known by locals. He also demonstrates a sort of violence that I really haven't seen from any of the Godzillas since the Tri-Star movie, wherein he's basically just a big dinosaur that will happily stomp and eat people.
The conventional Godzilla really only seems to kill people by proxy; either by destroying buildings or vehicles people are in or around, or by retaliating against military weapons, so it's strange to see him crushing swathes of humans underfoot and snapping up individual people like the T-Rexs from The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
That said, this movie feels so much like they skimmed the Godzilla development I mentioned above that there really isn't even a third act. There's the very brief intro in which Main Guy deserts the war and fails to intervene in Godzilla destroying the airbase, then we fast forward to him getting a platonic family and Godzilla attacking shore for the first time post-nuclear tests, then the rest of the movie is just THE PLAN to kill Godzilla, and executing the plan.
I really think this movie could have benefited from more Godzilla earlier, before he develops his nuclear breath, perhaps he's a recurring menace to the shores and each time he appears Main Guy just falls deeper into hopelessness. By the time of Godzilla's first appearance on the mainland, he can already produce the functional equivalent of a nuclear warhead, so there really isn't that slow burn or threat build-up that a story like this really needs.
Also all the grief that the characters are supposed to be experiencing falls just shy of being believable. Main Guy has an annoying case of Anime Angst, where he's just unrealistically non-communicative and lashes out in what seem like breaks from his character.
There are also multiple scenes in which he and other characters are screaming or crying, but there isn't a single teardrop in sight. These are the driest cheeks in Japan and these are supposed to be sad moments, but the one child actor is very obviously acting, and the actual actors don't have the benefit of a simple ****ing eyedropper so they can fake some ******* tears.
The final twist of the movie is the reveal that Main Girl actually didn't die offscreen (which was one of multiple predictable plot points), and she looks perfectly fine and is just sitting upright in bed wearing unstained bandages and a sling. The movie teases some weird black thing creeping under her skin which relates to literally NOTHING that I'm aware of, so all this scene really does is take me out of the moment by presenting me three characters, who should all be weeping in each others arms, but for the fact that
one of them is a child is hasn't been directed to act sad,
one of them is a man who can't look convincingly sad on camera,
and one of them is an allegedly injured woman with no visible injuries who's been directed to sit perfectly still in bed instead of embracing her family which we've just implied will finally be reunited, married, and free of Godzilla.
The intended emotion just isn't there.
And it sucks because I thought Godzilla looked pretty cool in this too. They used his classic theme to good effect, and his classic roar, and an otherwise minimalistic score does a good job of evoking tension and sadness... It's just hard to appreciate the sad moments, and Godzilla kinda blows his load too early.
The plan to kill Godzilla comes down to a scheme to saddle him with freon gas canisters to sink him to a crushing ocean depth, which sounds plausible enough, but the "Plan B" is to use rapid inflatables to bring him back to surface and kill him with the bends, which doesn't make any ****ing sense to me.
If a sudden 1800 meter depth worth of pressure isn't enough to kill something, why would rapidly decompressing it do anything? Aren't you just applying the same amount of force in two different directions? The describe the effect this has on Godzilla as "damage" which kinda communicates how little thought actually went into this idea.
Great idea to bring your certain death back to the surface where it can kill you. At least it produced a kinda sick-looking visual when it results in a zombie-like Godzilla 'bout to fire muh lazer.
This movie ends by of course teasing that Godzilla's not actually dead before dropping title on us: "G: Minus One", which is such a dumb name for this movie especially once you've seen it and realize literally nothing in the movie explains the reason for the name.
I think it's poorly explained in a marketing blurb I've seen about how postwar Japan had been "reduced to zero" and therefor adding Godzilla makes it "MINUS ONE", which just so cheesy it sounds like something a child would think up.
Obviously it'd be much more forgivable if the movie was actually really good, but it ended up as just a capstone on what felt like 80% of the way to an actually solid movie.
At least the CG was way better than that Furiosa trailer.
Final Verdict: [Okay]