Godzilla Minus One

A confession: When I watched Gladiator II Sunday afternoon and later sat down to review it, I struggled to view it on its own terms—not only because it was a middling sequel to one of my favorite movies but also because the night before I had watched one of the best movies I’ve seen in years: a moving historical drama with great characters, rich themes of fear, duty, and love, a fast-moving, exciting plot… and a radioactive monster. That movie is Godzilla Minus One.

The story begins in the final days of World War II, as Koichi Shikishima lands his rickety fighter plane on a small island airstrip. Shikishima is a kamikaze pilot and had been on his way to attack the American fleet when he developed engine trouble. The mechanics, the only personnel on the island, find nothing wrong with his plane. Before any uncomfortable conversations can occur or Shikishima can leave to complete his mission, a gigantic creature known to the locals as Godzilla rises out of the ocean and wipes out the airfield crew—all but Shikishima and the lead mechanic, who blames Shikishima, who was too terrified during the attack to jump into his plane and fire his guns at the monster, for his men’s deaths.

Back in Japan following the surrender, Shikishima finds his family home destroyed. A crochety neighbor, Sumiko, gives him the bad news—his parents were killed in the firebombing. When she realizes that he is a kamikaze pilot who came back from the war alive, she heaps him with shame. Shikishima is thus left living literally in the ruins of his former life.

Things change when he runs into Noriko, a homeless young woman whom Shikishima first meets as she flees arrest for theft. As she runs through a crowded market she bumps into him, presses a baby girl into his arms, and runs on. Unsure of what to do, he waits, unable to leave the baby and uncertain of where to look. Noriko finds him as evening comes on and explains that the baby, Akiko, is not hers, but the child of a woman killed in the firebombing. Noriko swore to look after her little girl.

Shikishima takes them in and, slowly, over the next few years, the three build new lives for themselves, Noriko looking after Akiko and Shikishima taking whatever work he can find to provide for them. Purely through the habit of sharing a house, relationships form, albeit strictly in one direction. Akiko, as she learns to talk, calls Shikishima “daddy,” a title he reminds her does not belong to him. Noriko, clearly, loves Shikishima, and yet he remains closed off. When his coworkers learn that Shikishima and Noriko are not married and misunderstand the situation, demand that he marry her. But he cannot, he thinks, because his war never actually ended.

The best work that Shikishima finds is minesweeping, well-paying but dangerous work aboard a small, slow wooden fishing boat with a crew of eccentrics—old salt Akitsu, naval weapons expert Noda, and Mizushima, a young man drafted too late in the war to see action. It is here, with this group, that Shikishima encounters Godzilla again.

Atomic weapons testing in the Pacific—we are explicitly shown the Bikini Atoll test—has transformed the monster from a huge deep-sea lizard to a monster that towers over cities and can breathe a “heat ray” with the power of an atomic bomb. In the process of fighting the monster off as he approaches Japan, Shikishima and his crewmates also learn that Godzilla can also heal quickly from even severe wounds. Godzilla’s first attack on Tokyo is genuinely terrifying—and tragic for Shikishima.

The rest of the film is concerned with the attempts of a freelance group of ex-Imperial Navy men to stop Godzilla. A demilitarized Japan has no official power to help and the American occupiers are more concerned with the Soviets, so it is up to Shikishima and others to take care of the problem themselves. Fortunately—or unfortunately, given Shikishima’s long-fermenting deathwish—they have found a way to use Shikishima’s peculiar wartime training to their advantage.

That’s more of a plot summary than I intended to write, but Godzilla Minus One is not just a monster movie, it’s a genuine, moving human drama with a well-realized historical setting and characters whose plights immediately involve us. Unlike a lot of similar disaster or monster movies, Godzilla Minus One has no unlikeable characters, no cheap comedy sidekicks, no hateful villains. All of them are worth spending time with and all of them matter. (This is, in fact, a thematic point.) This human dimension gives the monster attack scenes—whether aboard a fishing boat, in the heart of Tokyo, or racing across the countryside—weight, suspense, and excitement. I haven’t been this tense in a movie in a long time.

The story also proves surprisingly moving because, again, unlike a lot of similar recent movies, it dares to explore deep themes and treats them seriously. Most prominent among these is duty. Time and time again, when Shikishima is presented with something he must do—shoot at a monster, take care of a baby, marry the girl who loves him—he freezes. Shikishima’s arc is to move from fleeing duty, to passively accepting duty, to embracing it willingly. And yet without something else to temper it, his final, fearless embrace of duty could lead to precisely the kind of cold, bloodyminded sacrifice that got him into the cockpit of a flying bomb during the war. What that something is, what gives meaning to duty, I leave for y’all to discover.

When it came out last year, Godzilla Minus One was lauded for its special effects, and rightly so. The film looks amazing. The effects complement the story perfectly and are, for the most part, seamless. For long stretches I was so involved in the story that I forgot I was watching a computer-generated lizard chasing a boat or stomping around Tokyo. That this film did so much on a fraction of the budget of even the most modest Marvel movie should put Hollywood to shame—and remind us that it’s story and characters that make movies, not VFX.

I missed this one when it was briefly in theatres near me, but that made the sweet surprise of Godzilla Minus One all the more overwhelming when I finally watched it last weekend. If you’re looking for the perfect combination of sci-fi monster action and grounded, thematically rich drama, Godzilla Minus One is one of the rare films that will meet that need. And it does so brilliantly.