[COLUMN] Godzilla Minus One is a Well-Made Blockbuster, a So-So Godzilla Movie | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Godzilla Minus One.

Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is an impressive piece of blockbuster filmmaking, a movie with incredible scale and spectacle, anchored in very real human emotion and propelled by an earnest sincerity.

It is remarkable that the film was produced for less than $15m. Of course, it is somewhat pointless to compare budgets across borders, given the variable cost of labor and differences in infrastructure. For example, while RRR was produced for just $69m, it was still the most expensive Indian film ever made. That said, like the $80m budget on The Creator and the $166m budget for both Rebel Moon films, Godzilla Minus One demonstrates that blockbusters can be made on reasonable budgets.

Godzilla Minus One has performed well with international audiences. Critics are raving about it. It is a genuine word-of-mouth hit, enjoying an incredible 90% hold across its second weekend and landing third at the domestic box office this past weekend behind The Boy and the Heron and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. It has earned over $50m at the global box office to date, becoming the highest-grossing live-action Japanese film in the United States.

To be fair, it is easy to understand why Godzilla Minus One has resonated with American movie-goers. It is an extremely accessible blockbuster, even beyond the eponymous monster’s brand recognition. Godzilla Minus One borrows a lot from major American blockbusters, demonstrating a much finer understanding of the form than many contemporary Hollywood filmmakers. Godzilla Minus One is a Japanese blockbuster that owes a lot to Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan.

Most obviously, Jaws is a huge influence on Godzilla Minus One. Extended portions of the movie find the protagonist, Kōichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), out on an old boat in the ocean with a veteran seaman, Yōji (Kuranosuke Sasaki), and an eccentric scientist, Kenji (Hidetaka Yoshioka), as they hunt a monster lurking beneath the waves. Jaws was the first true summer blockbuster, and so it makes sense for it to exert an influence on this crowd-pleasing spectacle.

“There's definitely influence from Spielberg and Jaws,” Yamazaki told IGN. “It probably comes out in a very subconscious way at this point.” The press notes for Godzilla Minus One cite Yamazaki’s “childhood encounters” with George Lucas’ Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind as formative influences on his choice of career in visual effects. Yamazaki has even used the press tour for Godzilla Minus One to put himself forward as a potential Star Wars director.

There are more modern influences as well. At the climax, as the monster threatens to overwhelm the ships assembled around it, a fleet of smaller boats arrives, like the climax of Dunkirk. Kōichi makes an aborted kamikaze run into the creature’s flaming mouth, like Finn’s (John Boyega) dive at the battering ram cannon in The Last Jedi. However, as in The Dark Knight, it’s retroactively revealed that Kōichi’s heroic sacrifice is rendered moot by technology: he has discovered the eject button.

Like many of those blockbusters cited, there is an endearing sincerity to Godzilla Minus One. The film takes itself and its characters relatively seriously, at least in the context of a story about a gigantic radioactive monster. There aren’t too many wry one-liners. Dramatic beats aren’t undercut with cheap jokes. The movie never feels the need to wink at the audience in order to reassure them that this creature feature isn’t taking itself too seriously. It’s refreshing and compelling.

There is also a very strong nostalgia at play in Godzilla Minus One. Allowing for an introductory sequence that takes place during the conflict, the bulk of the movie unfolds in the aftermath of the Second World War. Although the events of the film technically take place a few years before Ishirō Honda’s 1954 original, Godzilla Minus One alternates between an affectionate love letter to the original Godzilla and sequence-by-sequence remake.

Godzilla Minus One is saturated with references to Honda’s Godzilla. The opening sequence takes place on Odo Island. The creature attacks Tokyo, tearing apart a train car. Reporters frantically broadcast from a vantage point above the streets, before provoking the beast’s attention. Individual shots, like the tanks lining up to oppose the monster, feel like they could have been lifted directly from Honda’s original. Composer Naoki Satō quotes liberally from Akira Ifukube’s classic score.

This nostalgia makes sense in the larger context of Yamazaki’s career. The director is on record as arguing that Godzilla is tied to a particular moment in Japanese culture, “You can’t have Godzilla unless it’s from the Shōwa era.” Yamazaki’s returns time and again to nostalgic invocations of mid-twentieth century Japan, often tied to nationalistic and military service, as in movies like The Eternal Zero and The Great War of Archimedes.

Yamazaki also directed the Always: Sunset on Third Street trilogy, set against the backdrop of late 1950s and early 1960s Japan. Godzilla briefly appears at the start of the second of those three films. In this context, it is perhaps worth acknowledging that controversial nationalist Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was an avowed fan of Yamazaki’s nostalgic invocations of older Japan. He reportedly loved The Eternal Zero and Sunset on Third Street was apparently his favorite film.

This gets at the strange emptiness to Godzilla Minus One. The Godzilla franchise has always alternated between goofy fun and big ideas. The original Godzilla is one of the most compelling anti-war films ever made, while Toho Studio’s last Godzilla film, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla, was a blistering study of bureaucratic incompetence in the face of unimaginable tragedy. Godzilla Minus One draws so much from Godzilla, it seems to position itself as spiritual successor.

Unfortunately, it’s never quite clear what exactly Godzilla Minus One has to say about its postwar setting. In the wake of the Second World War, Japan was devastated. Many of its cities had been leveled by sustained aerial bombardment. It had witnessed the first (and to date only) use of atomic bombs on a human population. It was under American Occupation, with no real military to speak of and with severe limitations on freedom of expression. There is a lot to explore there.

Godzilla Minus One largely skirts around this. The American Occupation is referenced a few times, but mostly to excise it from the plot. There is an announcement that “recent Soviet movements prevent US military assistance” played over black-and-white newsreel footage. Later, Captain Hotta (Mio Tanaka) explains that “any GHQ-led military action runs the risk of escalating US-Soviet tensions.” America is seemingly nonplussed by a giant lizard showing up in their occupied territory. The Russians don’t seem concerned about their borders.

There is also no sense of Japan as a political entity in Godzilla Minus One. Watching the movie, it seems like the devastation of the Second World War was just something that happened to these characters, with no larger context. Yamazaki describes Godzilla as “an undiscerning god”, divorcing it from the laws of cause and effect. Throughout the film, it seems like these are just random people who found themselves in the middle of these horrific circumstances, with no real agency or agenda.

Returning home, Kōichi strikes up a relationship with a young woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who is caring for a child, Akiko (Sae Nagatani), who happened to end up in her care. “So you… have no relationship to that child?” Kōichi asks. Noriko replies, “Nope. So what?” Kōichi end up together passively, rather than by any choice. When Kōichi tells his neighbor Sumiko (Sakura Ando) that he hasn’t “picked” Noriko and Akiko up, Sumiko replies, “If they’re staying, you picked them up.”

Godzilla Minus One makes a few anti-war sentiments, but these feel like affectations. Journeying to face the monster, Yōji bans young crewmember Shirō (Yuki Yamada) from the expedition. “Not having been to war is something to be proud of,” Yōji tells the younger man. However, Godzilla Minus One is also about how sometimes older generations have to fight wars for their kids. “We leave you the future,” Yōji shouts. Climbing into the cockpit, Kōichi remarks of Akiko, “I want to protect her future.”

Watching Godzilla Minus One, there’s a sense that the movie is not so much opposed to war as it is opposed to “politics.” “You’ve all survived a tragic war,” Hotta tells the assembled volunteers. “So it pains me to ask you again to put your lives on the line. But understand this. We can’t rely on the US or Japanese government. So the future of this country is in our hands.” It’s a movie that ends with the characters triumphantly going to war. Even Shirō gets to ride in at the last minute to save the day.

Yamazaki has talked about how this aspect of the script was influenced by his experience of the global pandemic, specifically the realization that, “Hey, the government’s not doing anything. This is going to be up to us.” Having lived through that same pandemic, Yamazaki’s faith in people’s ability to unite in pursuit of the greater good feels almost naïve. After all, the burden of the pandemic was not shared equally, even in Japan. This is the flipside of that sentimentality and nostalgia.

Yamazaki draws heavily from 1970s Spielberg, as opposed to the director’s later meditations on relevant themes, like Saving Private Ryan, War of the Worlds or Munich. Even the original Godzilla ends on an ambivalent note, as Doctor Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) ponders the possibility that the “oxygen destroyer”, the weapon that defeats the monster, might bring about mutually assured destruction. In contrast, the ending of Godzilla Minus One is boldly triumphant.

Kōichi and Noriko are in Tokyo during the monster’s attack on the city. At the sequence’s climax, Noriko pushes Kōichi out of the way of a shockwave, only to be consumed by it herself. The implication is that Noriko is gone, the surrogate family that she created with Kōichi has been destroyed. As he goes off to war, Kōichi leaves Akiko with Sumiko, making her an orphan twice over. These sequences are genuinely affecting, underscoring the movie’s emotional stakes.

However, in its closing moments, Godzilla Minus One pushes back on these. Kōichi survives his encounter with the beast. He then gets word that Noriko survived the shockwave in Tokyo. The two reunite in a hospital at the end of the film, a sequence which recalls the framing device that Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the American edit of the original film, imposed on Honda’s Godzilla, placing American reporter Steve Martin (Raymond Burr) in hospital after the Tokyo attack.

Godzilla Minus One is still an impressive and well-made blockbuster, a compelling spectacle of cinematic craft. It’s propulsive and arresting. However, despite inviting comparisons, it also lacks the bite of Shin Godzilla and the original Godzilla. This version of the monster is swimming in much shallower waters.