Monsterpiece Theater

Film: Godzilla Minus One (Gojira -1.0)
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

I’m not really a kaiju guy. I don’t actively hate them the way I hate televangelists or people who leave their shopping carts in the middle of a parking space, but I don’t generally go out of my way to watch giant monster movies. It’s not quite a “when you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all” thing, but it’s in that ballpark. Godzilla Minus One (or Gojira -1.0 if you prefer) got a lot of acclaim, though, and also won the big lizard his first Oscar, so it was hard to resist.

My ambivalence to kaiju is almost certainly related in part to early Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, which were rife with Gamera movies. Sure, it’s fun to watch a giant turtle fly through space and attack another dude in a rubber suit, but there are a bunch of them right in a row, and it gets tedious. These movies also went through a strange evolution. Godzilla, Gamera, and the rest started as giant beasts created by radiation or pollution taking out their rage on the Japanese countryside. Over time, though, they became the heroes, fighting monsters worse than they were, causing destruction like superheroes. The buildings still got knocked down, but our hero kaiju were doing it to defend Japan rather than destroy it.

Godzilla Minus One goes back to the original roots of the subgenre. There’s no second monster here, no little child saved by Godzilla, no crowd of Gozilla well-wishers urging him to fight to protect the people of Japan. No, this is post-war Japan dealing with the destruction of the war encountering something that is going to make their existence far worse. That’s the meaning of the title, in fact. Japan has been reduced to rubble, knocked back to zero, and now it’s going to get a lot worse.

There’s one thing that makes a Godzilla film, or any kaiju film work, and that’s where it is focused. For any kaiju film, the money shots are always when the monster attacks, but the focus here is on the people where it should be. Who cares about meaningless destruction? It’s meaningful destruction that matters and should matter to us. The film deals with Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), who was a kamikaze pilot in the war, but panicked, claiming his plane had mechanical problems. The airfield he landed at was then attacked by Godzilla, and he panicked again, failing to shoot to repel the monster, and virtually everyone on the airfield was killed.

Koichi returns in disgrace to discover that his family has been killed in the Allied bombings of Japan. He encounters the fury of his neighbor Sumiko (Sakura Ando) because of what she considers his cowardice. He also encounters Noriko (Minami Hamabe), a survivor who has rescued a young girl named Akiko (Sae Nagatani). Eventually, Koichi and Noriko become a couple, and needing to provide for them, Koichi takes a job on a minesweeper, helping to rid the ocean around Japan of the thousands of sea mines placed there during the war.

Naturally, this is going to eventually result in more encounters with Godzilla, further mutated thanks to the atomic tests done on the Bikini Atoll . While the human story is what gets us interested in what is happening, the rampaging radioactive lizard monster is why we’re here. The story is ultimately one of redemption, though, and while the people of Japan learn to deal with the crisis of a huge monster attacking them—something the government fails to warn them of to prevent panic—Koichi figures out that Godzilla can be best hurt or killed by attacking him internally, which means that once again he may be asked to fly a kamikaze mission.

The story is a good one, and the effects are, honestly, what I’ve always wanted to have in a Godzilla movie. I won’t speak for anyone else, but I think I do when I say that what we want is the destruction of a city to look like the real thing, not a guy in a rubber suit kicking down plywood miniatures. I love that this finally got the big lizard an Oscar, and a deserved one, because Godzilla Minus One looks great.

This is the kaiju movie that fans wanted, I think (again, as someone who is not a huge kaiju fan, I might be speaking out of turn), and for that it’s something worth seeing. I probably won’t watch it a second time, but I would guess that Godzilla junkies are going to have this one tattooed on them with pride.

Why to watch Godzilla Minus One: Godzilla is cool.
Why not to watch: Honestly, how many times do you want to see a kaiju attack Japan?