Thoughts on Godzilla Minus One

 

I went to see Godzilla Minus One today, and liked it a lot. I wasn’t interested initially, because I’ve never been into Godzilla movies, but this one got great reviews, so I checked it out. The film was written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki. I liked that most of it is a character story about a Japanese kamikaze pilot named Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) in the last days of WWII who backed out of completing his suicide mission, then felt like a coward for not saving others, and struggled with survivor’s guilt, coming home to a bombed Tokyo, and falling into a makeshift family with a young woman named Noriko (Minami Harabe) and an orphan baby she found, and keeping himself emotionally distant because he doesn’t want to get too close.

    All the while, Godzilla is attacking, and growing more powerful with nuclear energy, and looking like a rough barnacled monster of the sea. And the government doesn’t want to tell civilians about Godzilla to avoid panic, so they won’t even tell them if Godzilla is headed their way.

    It’s an interesting movie about the emotional conflicts of being told to die for your country and die with honor, then feeling like a failure for not doing that, or not even being in a war, then questioning the government for not supporting civilians and withholding information for “their own good,” even if their lives are destroyed by a giant monster stomping on them and breathing fire on them.

    And the parts in the storyline about shaming someone for being a coward in war reminded me of the Tales from the Crypt episode “Yellow,” which takes place during WWI and is a father-son story of a general and his son (played by Kirk Douglas and his son Eric Douglas), where his son was raised in a military family and given a higher rank, though he is opposed to war and is a pacifist, and his cowardly actions cost others their lives, and he is court martialed and shamed for not sacrificing for his country. It had a lot of similar themes that I found in this movie relating to patriotism and war.

    I found this really interesting, and liked the shifts between the human stories and the Godzilla scenes. The only other Godzilla movie I’ve seen is the 2014 Gareth Edwards one, titled Godzilla, and aside from a good final battle, I thought most of the movie was dull with boring characters, so this one, all in Japanese with English subtitles, was a great deal better. And it kept playing the Godzilla theme, which I keep associating with a hip-hop song that sampled it, Pharoahe Monch’s “Simon Says.” So overall, it's a really good movie, and a much more interesting monster movie than I had expected.