Godzil­la Minus One review – Pre­ci­sion-tooled fun

Any­one who has the temer­i­ty to write off Godzil­la (fuck­ing Godzil­la!) as a spent force of fran­chise film­mak­ing will need to back­track right now. On the evi­dence of Takashi Yamazaki’s rip-snort­ing his­tor­i­cal action epic, Godzil­la Minus One, there’s still some nuclear-pow­ered juice in the lum­ber­ing metaphor­i­cal lizard yet.

The indus­tri­ous direc­tor, who also wrote the screen­play and col­lab­o­rat­ed on the (very slick) spe­cial effects work, strips the sto­ry back to basics, keep­ing con­text and expo­si­tion to a min­i­mum and lean­ing on robust, time­worn plot mechan­ics that focus on deliv­er­ing chunky thrills.

The film­mak­er has been open in inter­views about his love of Steven Spiel­berg and Christo­pher Nolan, and the evi­dence is up there on screen. But he has not pil­fered their styl­is­tic tics, but more their supreme sto­ry­telling tac­tics and the slow, intense build-up to a big finale. It’s a ​“back to basics” film which replays the sto­ry with a very straight bat, and it seems that the weird vari­a­tions on the Godzil­la mythos (see 2016’s Shin Godzil­la) have been swept aside from some­thing more pure­ly entertaining.

It’s 1945 in Japan, and things are not going well on the World War Two front, to put it mild­ly. Even the kamikaze pilots are find­ing excus­es to not sac­ri­fice their lives for what they now see as a lost cause – such is the case with pilot Kōichi Shik­ishi­ma (Ryuno­suke Kami­ki), who lands his plane on an island ser­vice base, com­plain­ing of machine faults as a way to shirk his nation­al­is­tic responsibility.

Unlucky for him and the gang of engi­neers who take him in, Godzil­la decides to roll up from the sea and pay them a smashy-smashy vis­it, which results in wide­spread mur­der. Shik­ishi­ma, scared out of his wits, doesn’t have the nerve to fire upon the beast from the cock­pit of his downed plane, and is thus blamed for the wipeout.

Back in Tokyo and racked with guilt, he takes in a woman and her orphan child and decides to join a crew of seabound mine sweep­ers in order to pay his – and their – way. It’s not long before he’s got some more face-time with his scaly, heat ray-blast­ing pal who, it tran­spires, can self-heal from all the heavy ordi­nance fire it takes. It’s after this sec­ond big action set piece that the touch­pa­per is lit for a grand cli­max which plays out in clas­sic heist movie style: we hear the details and jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for the mad­cap plan to destroy Godzil­la in immac­u­late detail, and then must palm-sweat intense­ly as it all pre­car­i­ous­ly plays out.

The film and its sub­texts all say one thing: don’t prod the mon­ster. Godzil­la, in its defence, only reacts vio­lent­ly when humans start to shoot at it. And the same les­son can be tak­en when it comes to nuclear diplo­ma­cy in the post­war peri­od, although one may ques­tion the notion sug­gest­ed here that Japan entire­ly brought on their prob­lems when it came to the bomb­ings of Hiroshi­ma and Nagasaki.

Yet Yamazaki’s film works as a per­fect entry point to the fran­chise and doesn’t require any pri­or knowl­edge of Godzil­la or his city-lev­el­ling pals. It’s pre­ci­sion-tooled in terms of struc­ture, almost to the point of air­less­ness, but you’d be hard-pressed to knock back the final 45-minute show­down as any­thing less than an impres­sive feat by a film­mak­er orches­trat­ing and chart­ing the fine process­es of an epic battle.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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