Godzilla Minus One Is a Blast from the Past in the Best Way

Godzilla Minus One is a delight for both longtime Godzilla fans and, based on the crowd response in my theater, new ones as well. I enjoyed every minute of it.

A long time ago, there was a span of a few weeks when I tried my darndest to convince my elementary school cohort that Godzilla was, in fact, as real as any religion, and wouldn’t it be fun if we started our own religion around Big G? I wouldn’t say I was completely successful, but when confronted with the fact that they couldn’t prove Godzilla didn’t exist, my young friends at least considered I might be on to something. Or maybe they said that to get me to stop evangelizing. Of course, this was a goofy and childish crusade, but I still stand by the sentiment. Godzilla is real.

Godzilla Minus One is somewhere between a remake and a reboot of the original Gojira (1954). That film took the giant monster subgenre as seen in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and King Kong (1933) and imagined it as a metaphor for nuclear devastation and the Japanese postwar experience. As time went on, the idea that Godzilla was one among many examples of giant mutations made by nuclear experiments became so dominant that many fans forgot that trauma created this terrible daikaiju.

Director Takashi Yamazaki has brought all that back. This Godzilla is terrifying, wrathful, and possibly a little unhinged. This creature is not here to defend the Earth—this is a mad god whose primal fury has been given the power of a thousand suns and no reason to not use it. I can’t help but wonder whether Godzilla Minus One was made as a response to the MonsterVerse Godzilla—a friendly reminder, if you will, of the horrors at the heart of the Godzilla story and the human costs of the monster rampages that offer plenty of entertainment in other films.

Even so, for all of the evidence of postwar trauma and nods to Japanese neorealism, Yamazaki doesn’t forget that this is still a Godzilla movie and there is business to take care of. There are plenty of points in the film where Gojira is commented on directly. We revisit the train scene from the original film, now all the more dynamic and violent, and now with a character whose story we know in jeopardy. There is a team dedicated to stopping Godzilla, but most do so without a massive army or air force to help them—because Japan no longer has either of those things. There is a human hero, as always, but this one has their own figurative monsters to deal with as well: a particular kind of survivor’s guilt and PTSD related to an earlier encounter with a giant dinosaur create an Ahab-esque obsession with the great destroyer. There is even a strange new aircraft brought out to challenge the monster, a trope that has been with Godzilla movies for several decades.

The bottom line is that this is a great Godzilla movie. I will not say it is the best because I don’t know how you quantify that. It certainly has the strongest cinematography and narrative technique of any recent Godzilla movie. The digital production is in the same league as the digital wonders of the MonsterVerse, and you could make the case that this Godzilla has more personality, in its own rabid way, than the MonsterVerse version.

I also don’t know whether it is critically honest to compare Godzilla Minus One to the many tokusatsu-style films. There are many styles of Godzilla, many ways to create new Godzilla myths. With all the digital wonder of Godzilla Minus One, it is a closer relative of Shin Godzilla than the MonsterVerse. The practical Godzillas, the ones with the “rubber suit,” can’t really be compared. If I may, this is like saying Leonardo’s The Last Supper is a better painting than Dalí’s The Sacrament of the Last Supper. It’s the same subject, but two wildly different styles and techniques, both of them made by artists with a sincere interest in their subject.

Godzilla has spawned scores of films, gathered legions of fans, and broken box office records despite all expectations. So while the monster may not be so real that I truly expect it to come ashore near Duluth (something I have long speculated about), it inspires both fear and worship, and the story of Godzilla is alive and well in 2023. That is real enough for me.

Skreeonk!

Note: Godzilla Minus One‘s limited US run has been extended, so you now have until December 14 to see it in theaters.

Toho