This is one of those movies that none of you are going to believe is actually great until you see it, so right here is a good time to just quit reading and maybe go check out the new "Godzilla" movie. Even if you don't like Kaiju films (although, really, what is there not to like), "Godzilla Minus One" has a lot to offer and might even change how you feel about monster movies in general.
Here's the thing about Godzilla and monster movies in general: we don't usually tune in for the humans. The enduring popularity of monster movies is connected to watching these giant creatures the size of skyscrapers destroy a city or seeing them fight each other. It's the same reason people watch professional wrestling or monster truck shows: big things smashing smashable things is entertaining and kinda doesn't really get old. Whenever the American Godzilla/King Kong movies slow down and spend time with their thinly written characters played by A-List actors, the movies stall and the audience's attention wanders.
"Godzilla Minus One" doesn't make that mistake for a second (which is downright insane for the 37th movie in a franchise); instead, it tells a fascinating and beautiful human story that just so happens to be populated by a giant lizard monster that blows atomic breath and screams with rage at the folly that men hath wrought. This "Godzilla" movie uses its setting for maximum thematic, emotional and metaphoric impact by telling a story that could only be told across the backdrop of giant, God-like monsters stalking a post-Hiroshima world.
Godzilla has always been a metaphor for nuclear weapons, ever since the big lizard appeared for the first time in 1954, but with "Godzilla Minus One" (celebrating Godzilla's 70th anniversary), gone is the campy goofiness of "All Monsters Attack" or the batshit insanity of "Destroy All Monsters" and "Mothra vs. Godzilla." The 2014 "Godzilla" started the American "Monsterverse" by telling a Godzilla story that took itself seriously, but following 2019's "Godzilla: King of the Monsters" and 2021's "Godzilla vs. Kong," the movies are shallow and goofy spectacle more than anything.
One of the reasons "Godzilla Minus One" is so great is how serious it takes an inherently silly idea. Set during the waning days of WWII, the film follows Kichi Shikishima (played by the fantastic Ryunosuke Kamiki) a former kamikaze pilot who saw Godzilla for the first time after faking technical issues with his plane to save his own life and landing on Odo Island. Godzilla shows up to the island and kills most of the men when Kichi freezes and cannot shoot the monster. After the war he comes home to Tokyo to find his parents died in the bombings and moves into the wreckage of their old house with a homeless woman, Noriko ishi (played by the luminous Minami Hamabe), and an orphaned baby she's caring for; building a makeshift family that his trauma and survivor's guilt won't let him truly connect with.
Kichi and Noriko are genuinely compelling characters whose story could carry an entire film on its own, let alone one where Godzilla keeps intermittently showing up and yeeting entire city blocks. We care about them and their little girl, and this version of Godzilla isn't the protector of children like he became in the later Showa era. This is a crusty and angry monster with eyes that give off pure alien insanity. We don't empathize with this Godzilla; instead, we fear for the Japanese lives the creature will destroy.
"Godzilla Minus One" is a refutation of all the Godzilla movies that have come before. Writer/director/FX Supervisor Takashi Yamazaki has looked back at the 70 years of Godzilla movies and taken one massively important lesson from them: the lives of the Japanese population in those films were treated as fodder for the monsters. Yamakazi treats every life as important and treats the psychological wreckage of post-war Japan as something to be taken seriously. I saw people crying in the theater after the film was over because they genuinely cared about the story and these characters.
BUT... it's also fun, taking cues from "Jaws," and "Dunkirk" while being proof positive that franchise fatigue doesn't exist if the movie itself is good. "Minus One" is not only the best Godzilla movie ever made, but also a damning indictment of the atomic age and the best spiritual sequel to "Oppenheimer" we're ever going to get.
This film reminds me of why I don't truck with cynicism when it comes to cinema: every single movie has the chance to be successful on its own artistic merits, regardless of the past failures of intellectual properties grown without artistry. "Godzilla Minus One" could have been a shameless cash grab shepherded by people without any artistic motivations. Instead, we have something beautiful that will be remembered as a high-water mark of genre filmmaking for years to come. I know it's hard to believe.
