Godzilla Minus One: Monster Movies Come Of Age

Godzilla's Back — Older, Bigger & Angrier

What works for Godzilla Minus One is its intimacy, sound design, and some of the finest visual effects (Oscar-winning, so of course) in recent times, writes Manik Sharma.

PERHAPS the most moving moment from Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, arrives not in the way of colossal battles, charred landscapes or crashing urban ruins, but the nervy breakdown of a protagonist tired of being afraid. In that moment he confesses to a stranger how survival continues to deny him the destiny of dignity. Monster films are often either of two things — starry canvases of action and sci-fi folklore, or trailing effigies of concretised hell. It’s incredible how significant vertical urban life is to the idea of the modern monster story. Which is why the brutal, unspecific levelling of a city scarcely feels as symbolic as the crumbling spirit of a man who can neither summon the courage to die nor can endure the burden of living either. Especially, back when concrete stood for the art of building as opposed to encroachment. To which effect, Godzilla Minus One is situated in a time-space where humans become the metropolis that monsters crush, battle and eventually succumb to.

The film begins in the last days of World War II. With the war effort petering out, Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a Kamikaze Japanese flyer returns to a remote island, having failed to execute his suicide mission. His desire to live urges the pilot to feign a mechanical failure. But here too Shikishima is confronted by the staggering odds of heroism in the form of a giant, wobbly lizard who walks out of the ocean. Once again, though, Shikishima freezes in his shoes, unable to rally enough adrenaline to retaliate or even defend his peers. This prologue sets up an underdog narrative that has more to do with human spirit born out of trauma than the heroic mobilisation of the alpha-male infantry. Japan, reeling from the aftermath of a nuclear attack, must horrifyingly face an even greater challenge — a radioactive monster with plain disregard for anything living in sight.

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Shikishima’s return to post-war Japan is a casual re-induction into mental hell. He has lived, but everything he lived for has perished. Japan has endured Allied bombings, a near collapse of civilisation, and is gradually cultivating the will to rebuild. The soft-spoken pilot restarts a life of sorts alongside a runaway survivor like himself, and a young girl he adopts as his daughter. Regret, however, returns in bounties of anxiety and palpitations. Still, life looks to be settling into a rhythm of acceptance. To this brightening horizon, the film feeds its bleakest, albeit expected twist — an older, bigger, angrier Godzilla.

What works for Godzilla Minus One is its intimacy, terrific sound design, and some of the finest visual effects — Oscar-winning, so of course — you might have seen in recent times. The visual scale, however, is attested to by emotional stakes of a battle that often feels more between man and monster as opposed to man and machinery. A ravaged nation, therefore, must rely on the anger of a serial loser, his distraught sense of self, to erect a defence. The kind that can only be led by a sort of mad yearning. Instead of state instruments, citizens turn to raw science, makeshift artillery, fishing boats, retired soldiers, and whatever strength they have built from being repeatedly punched down. Heroes emerge, quite literally, from within. It’s a country’s way of reviving its soul, of staring into a crevice of bottomless suffering and by sheer doggedness hitting a stroke of luminous resistance. This is a story about people who fight the monster, both on the streets and in their swollen, fragile guts.

Compared to the American trivialisation of what is essentially a character out of Japanese folklore, what serves Godzilla Minus One is the near randomness of its fury. Godzilla moseys into cities, crushes everything in sight, lights up entire landscapes with radioactive spittle and walks on without suggesting causality. The rage is unparalleled, the destruction arguably worse than the bombings that the country is still working to build past. We have encountered Godzilla’s unwieldy behaviour in the past but that cluelessness of exploring the food chain is replaced here by a genuine streak of murderous, at times incomprehensible, rage. Much like the nature of a bomb, the monster can’t be understood. He can only be resisted and fought.

In a year that also saw the release of the big-banner Godzilla x Kong, the tight-knit socialism of Godzilla Minus One, its lack of pseudoscientific chaos, and return to the era of fear and wonder, makes this Japanese cult masterpiece stand apart on its own. Because here, even in the presence of a monstrous lizard, the story clings to the heels of those trying to look up at him with a sense of doom and awe. The political subtext only adds to the density of a film that believes in tracking emotion over the trail (and tail) of fallen superstructures. At one point in the film, a Japanese military man admits that the country has bigger problems to solve. Bigger than the fire-puking radioactive dinosaur turning entire cities to ash. Therein lies the legacy of defeat, the trauma of witnessing a great fall before being urged to build again. To have no memory of victory. To live on, regardless of the many deaths the spirit has died.

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