A Film Directed by Takashi Yamazaki

There’s always a risk when talking about brand-new films in a long-running series, where one’s opinions sometimes end up clouded by recency bias. I’ve had that happen many times, enjoying and hyping a film up right afterwards, only to be less than impressed on a second viewing. This is why I have already gone out to see Takashi Yamazaki’s new film, Godzilla Minus One, a second time, and have reached one conclusion – Godzilla Minus One is at least on par with, perhaps even surpassing the original film from 1954 as the greatest film in the entire series. This is a fitting outcome, as the film is a love letter to the original and exists as a 70th anniversary release for the entire franchise. The film has been getting rave reviews, had its theatrical release window extended by at least another full week, and has moved into many critic top ten lists. Pretty amazing for such a long-running series that seems prone to franchise fatigue.

“The worst despair in the series’ history strikes Japan! After the war, Japan has been reduced to zero. Godzilla appears and plunges the country into a negative state. The most desperate situation in the history of Japan.”

So how did this happen? Why is Godzilla Minus One such a sleeper hit when almost every Hollywood blockbuster fell on its face this year? Well, first thing’s first – this 38th iteration of this long-running franchise had a budget of a mere 15 million dollars apparently, meaning that it easily made back all of its money and then some in only two days at the box office. You might be thinking that it might have bad special effects? You would be wrong, because I’d stack this film up against any big budget movie of the year and suggest that it looks infinitely better than most of them.

An example of this is the often derided Marvel Studios film, The Marvels. Clocking in at an insane $274.8 million production and advertising budget, the film made only $46,110,859 on opening weekend in 4,030 theaters. As of this writing, it has made close to $200 million worldwide when it would likely need close to a billion dollars to be considered a success. Not only that, the writing, special effects, and more were lackluster at best. I could go into an entire article about how bloated and unsustainable Hollywood film budgets have become, but that’s aside from the point of this review. I will just sum it up as this – Hollywood should be absolutely ashamed at how 2023 turned out for them. Highly anticipated action films, like The Flash, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and even Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One lost tons of Hollywood cash.

For me, the biggest selling point of this film is that it’s honestly pretty close to the first kaiju film where the audience actually cared about the human characters and what they were going through. Instead of making the people in the movie either comic relief (such as Transformers) or filler to drag out the runtime (The Monsterverse films), they are fully fleshed-out, well-realized characters in a period drama that could stand on their own. The film is set in Post-World War II Japan and focuses on civilians who are beginning to recover from the war’s aftermath. However, their recovery is disrupted by the appearance of Godzilla. Had the film removed Godzilla entirely and replaced him with something more conventional, it still would have been a good film.

The main character, a troubled man named Koichi, was supposed to be a “Kamikaze Pilot”, an infamous desperation tactic Japan employed in the waning years of the war. Kamikaze pilots were normal civilians who were usually given a crash-course in flying and were told to cause chaos with suicide attacks, their very planes turned into bombs. Not only is Koichi torn between a sense of failure, as he did not want to die, but also a sense of helplessness, as his entire family was nearly killed while he was gone. Returning home, Koichi felt as if he had nothing to live for and perhaps was living on borrowed time.

The situation gets worse when we find out Koichi is the lone survivor of a Godzilla attack, as the island the Kamikaze pilots used to refuel their planes just happened to be guarded by the titular creature, seen here as a folkloric beast, similar to many Shinto Yokai spirits. Suffering from hellacious PTSD, the only thing that keeps him going is a young family he creates including a young girl named Noriko and an orphaned child named Akiko. The three form a bond and basically become a family even though Koichi is reluctant to initially make it official. Just when everything’s looking up – Koichi has a job cleaning up sea mines, a family, and acceptance as not being a coward or a failure – Godzilla, now irradiated by American nuclear testing, decides to move away from the small island he called home and attack Tokyo.

Some bad things happen to Koichi, leaving him with a death wish and an obsession with making amends for his cowardice, so he signs up to hopefully destroy the monster once and for all. And while I won’t spoil any of the last third of the movie, it’s an emotional rollercoaster that takes the audience from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs. I became so invested in the characters that there are numerous scenes that I wanted to clap during, but I’m not that guy at the theater. When it’s all done, were left with a satisfying ending and potential for more films, which makes me very happy.

By focusing on the characters and pairing them with one of the coolest and most menacing Godzillas we’ve seen in a while (I’ve barely even touched on that!), this is almost the perfect blockbuster disaster film at 1/20th the cost of a Hollywood picture. Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is both a breath of fresh air and an example of what Hollywood needs to do in order to be successful post-Covid. They need to cut the bloat from CEO salaries, VFX costs, and merchandising and get back to making good films. Take a look at all the goodwill this film has -isn;t that what these guys should be shooting for?