Our atomic friend returns for a runout on the battered landscape of post-1945 Tokyo in Takashi Yamazaki’s stripped back action epic.
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.
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Published 13 Dec 2023
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