Godzilla Minus One (2023)

PG-13. I watched the movie with my kids and I'd say it's on par with a Jurassic Park movie in terms of horror.  The actually upsetting thing is that it often deals with suicide (in the form of a kamikaze pilot) and PTSD.  But I will give points to Godzilla Minus One for actually addressing the issues I've had with other Godzilla movies.  When Godzilla rampages through Japan, people actually die.  Instead of just muting that like the other films do, Godzilla Minus One wants to remind you that actual people are getting killed by this attack. A lot of people die and the movie doesn't want you to forget that.

DIRECTOR: Takashi Yamazaki

This!  This is the Godzilla movie I've been waiting for.  I waited a long time for this movie to be available and my waiting paid off.  I mean, sure, I stared down my wife and kids as they started joking through the first third of the movie.  But eventually, they shifted into where I was and realized that this movie had some meat to it.  Now, while I've now watched a good handful of Godzilla movies, I know that I haven't gotten through the bulk of them.  But I think I have enough to say "Why did it take so long to figure out what was right in front of us the entire time?"  

I want to get to my epiphany early because I can't promise that this idea is going to stick with me. (I've been going to bed incredibly late because it is summer and I've been playing video games almost methodically.  It's become a job because I know I won't have time to play video games for most of the year.  So 2:00 bed time and 8:00 wake up.  It's a pretty sweet life.) What makes Godzilla Minus One really work is that it focuses on the human element.  I'll be talking about that for probably the bulk of my blog today.  But the one thing that has hindered the rest of the Godzilla movies is that Toho always makes you kind of root for the monster.  Even with the first one, which is better than a lot of the other ones, the eponymous Godzilla is incredibly likable.  Sure, we're  meant to bond with whatever protagonist is thrown at us in these films.  But we're really ready for Godzilla to start tearing up the place.  Godzilla Minus One...doesn't do that.  

You know how Godzilla is King of the Monsters?  Yeah, he's actually a monster in this one.  The movie actually gets upsetting with what Godzilla is doing because most of the movie is devoted to making the human characters well rounded.  Now we're at what I've been talking about with all of my other Godzilla entries. I'm going to say that 75% of this movie is devoted to a human story and real problems that a character can face and the other 25% is Godzilla monster movie.  There was this thing that happened on Star Trek, in particularly Voyager.  The Borg were these big bad guys that, when they showed up, you knew stuff was going to go down.  Lives would change.  The status quo would go out the window.  But then in Voyager, the crew had to travel through Borg space.  Soon, the Borg were every other episode.  The problem with making the Borg show up too often was that it Nerfed the Borg.  They became beatable and escapable.  The same thing is true for Godzilla.  When you defeat him in every movie and no one's lives really change all that much, who cares anymore?  

My point is that Godzilla Minus One gives Godzilla gravitas.  When he shows up, people's lives are going to get way worse.  People are going to feel the effects of this monster who destroyed their homes and killed their loved ones.  It's not some party of giant creatures punching each other.  Godzilla's final acts up to this point are kind of like the last act of The Avengers.  When the Avengers fight the Chitauri and the city gets torn up, we get that it was the natural consequence of an alien invasion and that the Avengers were just doing their best.  Godzilla shouldn't be that.  There's a scene where Noriko is on a train going to a city where Godzilla is doing his thing.  That entire sequence is scary.  Honestly, I haven't watched one of these movies before and been scared.  Noriko, by this sequence, had built up so much goodwill and potential that meant that her life mattered in that scene.  It's the thing that horror movies forgot about.  We need to care about these characters so that scenes have meaning and consequences.

And the really funny thing?  I wouldn't necessarily call this a horror movie.  I mean, it is scary at times.  That train scene is anxiety inducing.  There's a scene that I intentionally won't talk about (even though I go spoilery) because I want this blog to get people out there watching this movie.  Instead, I'd say that this is a post-war drama.  Godzilla, for all the franchise has accomplished, has always kind of failed to deliver  on its social commentary in the way that I wanted it to.  Again, the first Godzilla was about the horrors of the nuclear age on real people.  The first movie made me intellectually understand that even though I never got the emotional resonance of that concept.  The rest of the franchise almost started gleefully enjoying the concept of nuclear monsters, often tampering with nuking Godzilla again. (That was pretty prevalent with the American Godzilla iterations.) 

This is a complicated story about the value of life, the role of family, and how people deal with real trauma.  Listen, I'm going to preach this as one of my favorite movies of 2023 (even though I just watched it and am pretty distant from the 2023 films now). Do some of these concepts get presented in pretty silly ways?  Yeah.  I won't deny that.  There are some goofball moments and moments where I feel like I'm just watching a disaster movie.  But what Yamazaki does with the disaster movie is what good sci-fi does with setting.  The reason that The Walking Dead works so well (for the most part) is that it ultimately is a human story and the zombies are just an element of chaos that escalates the natural drama between the characters.  Koichi is so filled with pathos.  It's a story about a man left with no good choices and the conflict between his choices of doing the right thing and his desperation to submit to his worst instincts and choose the immoral.  It's this sympathetic character that we want to scream at, not because he's ultimately an idiot, but because he's tortured and we can't scream at mental health issues.

Also, let's not ignore that Yamazaki somehow made a movie about a shared cultural trauma.  It's a movie about the end of World War II from the Japanese perspective that couldn't have been made in the 1950s.  It's a movie that reflects on the fact that 70 years have passed and that self-reflection can finally be made in the wake of lost patriotism / nationalism.  Guys, this is an impressive movie.  I have a very small window of kaiju movies that really hit the mark.  This might be my favorite kaiju movie.  Golly, I can't believe something is moving Pacific Rim out of first place, but this movie is fabulous.  So worth the wait.