Godzilla Minus One
A Perverse Throwback That Will Satiate Your Lizard Brain
Writer-director Yamazaki Takashi’s Godzilla Minus One begins on an island outpost in 1945, as kamikaze pilot Kôichi Shikishima (Kamiki Ryûnosuke) makes an impulsive choice to feign technical issues so he can avoid carrying out his suicidally nationalist duty. To him, living in shame is preferable to dying for glory, though the airman’s decision fatalistically coincides with the first appearance of a certain ravenous reptilian, who devours his way through a troop of aircraft mechanics while Kôichi cowers just out of sight.
Is Gojira, a.k.a. Godzilla, a manifested consequence of one man’s craven tendencies, or a symptom—as he often is in the decades-long series of films in which he appears—of some larger sociopolitical unease? This iconic movie monster began and often serves as a metaphor for deep-seated fears of nuclear testing and warfare, but in Godzilla Minus One he proves little more than a gargantuan antagonist, which is good enough for what Yamazaki sets out to do.
Any disappointments primarily stem from the film having to follow Anno Hideaki’s Shin Godzilla, a Fukushima-alluding cautionary fable inventively fused with a Thick of It-esque bureaucracy satire. Yamazaki, though, certainly gives himself as potentially potent a template, setting Godzilla Minus One mostly in the aftermath of World War II as Japan is at its cultural and economic lowest, and any sustainable future seems a pipe dream.