The big surprise with Godzilla Minus One is how moving it is. It’s strange to feel romance in a postwar environment, especially within a formerly belligerent country, but there’s the sense that the world is starting over in the Tokyo of the film. There’s an incredible solidarity in the first half hour, where every living person is experiencing some level of immiseration or grief or both and therefore there’s an opportunity in every interaction to dramatically help a neighbor. The baby that Noriko and Shikishima take care of is pressed into the latter’s arms in the local ramshackle market, and he takes several beats to consider the possibility of taking care of this child and the inverse of what will happen if he doesn’t. A brassy Sakura Ando plays a neighbor who lost her children in a bombing, and now takes in the neighbor kids at every opportunity. Everyone has an open hand towards their community, even though it’s not holding much.
These opening scenes are still humming in the viewer’s ears as the film contrives a reason to make the government incapable of mustering a counter-force to Godzilla, and the locals have to take on the job themselves. Another recent Godzilla adaptation, Shin Godzilla, centered the bureaucratic response to a monster invasion, but here, there’s no government to be found. This gives the film room for rousing speeches that are about the people transitioning themselves from order-following conscripts to decision-making citizens, where the value is placed on living and creating for your country instead of sacrificing one’s life for it. Godzilla is still a metaphor for what was done to Japan, but Godzilla Minus One surpasses its predecessors by also intimating at what Japan did, and how the assembled kaiju-fighters can prevent it from reoccurring.
Godzilla Minus One contains all that meaning and feeling while also delivering what everyone walks into a kaiju movie expecting to see. Yamazaki’s action scenes are tense and cover the minimum requirements of conveying scale and realism. The bar for Japanese kaiju movies is so low that as long as the zippers on the costume aren’t showing, it’s acceptable, and Godzilla Minus One is far above that. The fire breath is especially well-conceived here, befitting the IMAX screens that the film played on. However, it’s the human element that is most successful. The American equivalent of kaiju movies are spent waiting for the actors to get through their expository scenes so King Kong can get back to punching monsters, but here, while the monster action is good, the film is strongest when the screen is monster-free. When the atmosphere and context is as intriguing as it is here, Godzilla is an accentuating spice on a dish that’s great without him. A-