Godzilla Minus One is the best movie I have seen this year!
Godzilla has been around for quite around. We’re talking 70 years! We’ve had goofy Godzilla, big-budget Hollywood Godzilla, Dad Godzilla, and all kinds of variations on the same theme. But the one thing that hasn’t been done to perfection has been a Godzilla movie where we actually cared about the humans involved. The humans have always been the side show, and certainly not the reason to watch a Godzilla movie in the first place.
However, with Godzilla Minus One we have a human story that is captivating and heart wrenching. Their story is the heart of the movie.
Godzilla Minus One starts out in 1945 and introduces us to Kōichi Shikishima, who is a kamikaze fighter pilot that decides to abandon his mission by pretending to have a mechanical problem with his plane. Because of this decision, he feels shame and guilt from both internal and external forces.
How does he live with this decision? Is he a coward that failed his country or a victom of orders that devalued the lives of his countrymen? He once again is unable to act when Godzilla terrorizes the island base he has landed at, and many lives are seemingly lost because he isn’t willing to risk his own life in the face of danger.
We follow him as he makes his way back home and becomes entangled with he lives of other survivors, including Noriko and the baby she is protecting. Godzilla Minus One is about Japan and the devastation of war, the human spirit, and dealing with our own inner demons. It’s about finding courage, friendship, survival, and sacrifice.
It also finds time to speak to the fact that those in power did not value the lives of those they sent into war. It’s a lot of heavy stuff and all of the main leads in this movie do a fine job of carrying the weight of the story and pulling us in.
Then there is Godzilla. The monster, the terror, the destroyer. He is the bad guy here – a mindless animal killing tens of thousands of people and destroying what the people of Japan have tried so hard to rebuild.
Yes, you have seen some of this before – it’s hard not to after so many Godzilla movies, but you haven’t seen it done this well and you haven’t seen it mean so much for the characters on the screen. Godzilla Minus One might not be the man-in-suit so-bad-it’s-good fun from the past that we all know and love, but it is a real movie that packs a punch and it blew me away. It’s hard to see how it can get it better than this and I can’t wait to see it again.