Godzilla Minus One review: A roaring success
Review Overview
Monster snarls
9Human feels
9Size and scale
9Ivan Radford | On 01, Jun 2024
Director: Takashi Yamazaki
Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada
Certificate: 12
“This country has treated life far too cheaply,” muses a scientist in Godzilla Minus One, as a group of people attempt to work out how to deal with a gigantic mutant lizard who’s just turned up on their doorstep. If that scenario sounds familiar, that’s because this isn’t exactly Godzilla’s first outing – he’s had more than 30 films over the 70 years since he first stomped onto our screens in 1954’s Gojira. While a large number of those, particularly on this side of the pond, have upped the scale to get bigger and bigger, Godzilla Minus One lives up to its title and pares things back, building the film down to the franchise’s roots.
Almost functioning as a prequel, we begin right at the end of World War II, as a kamikaze pilot, Kōichi Shikishima, lands on Odo Island. Avoiding his fatal mission, something that would bring shame upon him in most people’s eyes, he’s traumatised yet further when Godzilla attacks the island and – after Kōichi’s too scared to shoot him – leaves the naive veteran as the sole survivor.
Just as Kōichi is a broken man at his lowest ebb, Japan too is at lowest point in history, and Godzilla Minus One emerges as a riveting and stirring story of a country clawing its way to hope, redemption and a future. Godzilla, who was the embodiment of nuclear terror and trauma in Toho’s original film, is here a similarly fearsome figure, but he’s an angry, fierce creature with little reasoning or motivation – he’s a snarling, ferocious monster, somehow smaller than his most recent American incarnation, yet feeling 10 times bigger.
Brilliantly, we first meet him in such an understated, almost intimate setting that his threat feels alarmingly new – writer and director Takashi Yamazaki is wonderfully inspired by Jaws in the way he introduces and builds up his reptilian villain. Jagged and scarred in appearance, he’s a walking explosion waiting to detonate – and it’s only once he’s been hit by the radiation of the US nuclear bomb tests that he acquires his signature heat ray.
Kōichi, meanwhile, finds himself work clearing up naval WWII mines at sea – the kind of low-key mission that recalls Spielberg’s monster flick. Winding up with a makeshift family of fellow traumatised survivors – including Noriko, a woman whose parents died in a bombing, and a baby, Akiko, she rescued – he’s a protagonist who keeps us firmly away from big military solutions: this is a take in which ordinary people bind together to save the day, making this a fitting cousin to Shin Godzilla, which used its own monstrous scenario to satirically critique national bureaucracy.
Behind the camera, Yamazaki expertly balances tiny details and close-up visual effects with city-stomping destruction – with a few nods to shots from the 1954 classic that are echoed the similarly affectionate soundtrack. Crucially, though, he manages the tricky feat of keeping us emotionally invested in the humans in the fray, rooting every frame and flick of Godzilla’s tail in pain and anguish. The result is an inventive reinvention of the Godzilla series that reminds us that it’s not just size that matters but how you use it. It’s a snarling blockbuster that values life almost as much as it values and understands its own franchise history. A thrilling, inventive, roaring success.