Review-Godzilla Minus One
Japan's favorite Kaiju is back with the well deserved Oscar for visual effects
Netflix recently added Godzilla Minus One to its slate of available films, and I took the opportunity to finally catch up with the Oscar winner for Best Visual Effects. It’s true that the film deserved the nomination and win, but I was more impressed with the rest of the film when the titular kaiju wasn’t even on screen.
Godzilla Minus One takes a step away from the Legendary Pictures “Monsterverse” that has seen Godzilla and King Kong featured in solo films before going head to head in Godzilla vs. Kong in 2021 and finally teaming up in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire earlier this year. It is much more of an origin story that begins in the closing days of World War II and continues through the aftermath of the war as seen from the perspective of the Japanese people.
Ryunosuke Kamiki stars as Kōichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who fails his mission and finds himself on a remote island airstrip looking for repairs. The base is attacked by a giant creature and he is one of the sole survivors. He returns home and discovers his family was killed, his home is destroyed, and he is disgraced for his failure as a kamikaze pilot. He sets about trying to find work and ends up on a minesweeper ship, clearing the seas around Japan all while helping a young woman and an orphan he meets in the streets as a way of making amends for his military failure.
The film does an excellent job of showing both individuals dealing with the end of the war in varied ways and how the nation deals with it's new position in the world. When a much larger Godzilla reappears and starts taking out American warships, Japan is left on its own due to fears from the U.S. that sending aid will provoke all out war with the U.S.S.R. Former Japanese military men band together to make a desperate attempt at killing the creature by sinking it and crushing it in the depths of the ocean. Shikishima plans to atone for his failure in the war by making a kamikaze attack on Godzilla and leave the orphaned child in the care of his neighbor before leaving for the mission.
I’ll leave the summary there to not spoil the ending, but some of the best scenes in this film are those involving the people, the individuals that are faced with a seemingly invincible foe. Godzilla shrugs off an explosion that blows off half his face by simply regenerating the missing tissues, but the rag tag group of former military men decide to go an face it again to protect their country. Shikishima rescues the young woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and brings her and the orphaned child she saved into his home, such as it is. They initially don’t talk of marriage or any sort of relationship, but remain solely focused on survival and living through to the next day. Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) is the former naval weapons engineer who comes up with the plan to sink Godzilla, now trying to use his brilliance to protect his country and people rather than attack the rest of the world.
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