In ‘Godzilla Minus One,’ Finally, Some Interesting People to Smush

The problem with modern entries into the Godzilla canon, like with many lucrative but fantastical pieces of IP, has been “making the human characters interesting”. With a heavily foregrounded dramatic backbone so solid it would still succeed without any Kaiju bombast, the newest Japanese entry into the canon, Godzilla Minus One, unambiguously achieves what other recent attempts have either fumbled or ignored. 

This new take takes what in retrospect seems like an obvious tack: just make another realist, down-to-earth war drama, replicating the original 1954 Gojira, to which it is a direct prequel. On top of that, the narrative is novel: Koichi (Kamiki Ryunosuke) is a coward Kamikaze duty dodger, returned to a ruined home in shame after failing not only his duty, but to save comrades from Godzilla. Bombing survivor Noriko (Hamabe Minami) and Akiko (Nagatani Saki), an orphan she rescues, fall into his lap, and they form a ragtag, extralegal family. Koichi picks up a trad 9-to-5 job as a minesweeper preceding a great little montage of deepening domestic bliss, though his aquatic second encounter with Godzilla is looming, waiting to disrupt his peace.

Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla (2014) was the first of the recent strategies to kiss the frog king and make him human. Edwards’s indie-film texture was so empty it rendered the human-monster dynamic an ironic Lovecraftian meta, which if anything just reinforced the need for relevant humanity for the big guy to smush.

Next came Kaiju Maestro Hideaki Anno’s celebrated Shin Godzilla (2015), which had a similar, if this time intentional, view of humanity’s cosmic irrelevance, spoofing our collective bureaucratic approach to wrangling the unknowable (and, topically, the Fukushima meltdown). While perhaps shrewd of Anno to slyly lean into the pleasureful side of the destruction with this schadenfreude, it didn’t really answer the question.

The next American entry, Godzilla: King of Monsters (2019) idiotically forgot the monsters altogether and hung out with the people for 95 percent of the run time as they made bad jokes and riffed, trying to destroy villainy as a concept like every other piece of corporate film art at the time. 

The series followed the medium as a whole, trending away from Edwards’ ethereal artistry and into failed and forced monocultural sludge and content-ified, grey-colored prestigiously-budgeted streaming TV, as well as three straight-up inhuman Netflix anime films. It left one wondering if the series would ever realize the dream of creating a character you’d actually miss Godzilla stepped on them, despite the heightened contemporary demand for such a thing. Even the original Gojira, while highly regarded as a devastating national requiem filled with palpable terror, has no centralized lead and so it lacks the same intimacy as the subsequent 37 films. Ironically, it took a prequel to get us there. 

However, despite concocting such a rich template and threading its beats elegantly, writer-director-VFX artist Yamazaki Takashi (heretofore known for big budget anime adaptations without any press in the West) mars the effort with performance worthy of a cloying melo-J-drama. Kamiki embodies dead-man-walking survivor’s guilt with all the bluster and gee whiz of a teen idol, doing his hysterical damnedest to evade the stoic subtlety inherent to the character. He’s all shakes, no shellshock. There’s some charm in the ensemble’s margins, but Japanese “volume performance” prevails and just doesn’t square with what should optimally be a serious, muted mode.

But what arguably does more to aid Godzilla Minus One’s emotional depth is the intimacy of the disaster scenes, which render all our species’ technological accoutrements insignificant with a 15-million-dollar physicality to embarrass common contemporary cinema spectacle. The scale of the film sings as Godzilla menaces down a tugboat or spins the gravity on Noriko dangling from a chomped-on train, contextualizing both human frailty and Kaiju immensity with simple, scary in-frame juxtaposition. Godzilla Minus One finally, movingly proportions the true size of a human life, between its story of a would-be suicide casualty in a lost war and its physical vision of a dragon slayer. So even through a histrionic tone, you couldn’t honestly say it doesn’t at least fulfill its humanist-Kaiju project, even if this, the preeminent destruction porn franchise, never really needed to realize it.