Genre Monster: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

One of the few movies to actually live up to the hype

When people tell me they despise genre, my standard retort is that it’s because they’ve only seen it be done poorly. In the proper hands, genre is just as good as any story form because it focuses on the characters and themes first and the genre stuff second. The genre stuff almost becomes background to the human drama, which  imbues the genre stuff with so much more impact. For example, the final lightsaber duel between Luke Slywalker and Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi is about so much more than “Hey look, cool good guy is gonna beat evil bad guy!” Star Wars worked to transcend its genre roots by making us care about universal human themes like forgiveness and redemption and sacrifice.

For genre to work it, like any other, uh, genre, needs to be inspired by myriad works of cultural import. Writing genre doesn’t negate your ability to provide subtext and symbolism, to highlight themes and inculcate values, and yes, to have a message. The best so-called “genre trash” is not inspired by fan-fiction, video games, or solely by other works within the genre; it is inspired by and harkens back to antiquity, to the great works, to religious text, to the canon . . . it all forms the great chain of culture, of civilization. Very lofty stuff.

Godzilla Minus One does the same, but with a giant monster.¹

The latest entry in the venerable 37-film franchise, Godzilla Minus One has been shattering foreign-movie records and receiving critical acclaim (it has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, for what that’s worth),² and is being hailed as one of the, if not the, best Godzilla movie of all-time, either tied with, better than , or just behind the 1954 original.

I have not seen anywhere near enough of these 37 movies to make an informed ranking, but I can say that Godzilla Minus One is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. It both leans into and transcends its genre roots because writer/director Takashi Yamazaki made sure the actual human story was good before adding all of the Kaiju accoutrements. It’s really just screenwriting 101, but it feels like refreshing magic in the Year of Our Lord 2023.

Major American studios could never make a movie like this, both thematically and with its paltry $15 million budget, for a few reasons. For starters, there are no black people in it. Or Hispanic people. There aren’t any white people in it either, but that’s not a problem for American studios—in fact, that’d be a badge of honor. Further, there are only two women, by my count. Forget that they’re important characters; that doesn’t matter. Important to the story they may be, they are not kicking ass and taking names, so therefore they might as well not be there. Unless a 98-pound woman is body slamming a giant monster when all the big, tough, strong pigs men failed, a movie is highly problematic.

Godzilla Minus One takes place in Japan in the aftermath of World War II, and therefore features nothing but Japanese people. Such a fact did not bother this moviegoer, but seeing as how Japan has come into the crosshairs of the powers that be for being in sufficiently diverse—I guess the Japanese are (dis)honorary whites now?—I think it bears mentioning. I haven’t seen the movie criticized on this ground yet, but give it time. Historical accuracy be damned, Godzilla Minus One needs more color! It needs a gay subplot! It needs withering attacks against the patriarchal Japanese society that keeps women down! In other words, it needs to have the sensibilities of modern day Portland, Oregon, but set in post-war Japan. I will be pleasantly surprised if my prediction of race-based criticism does not come to pass.

Let’s talk plot. The movie opens in the war’s dying days as kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lands his plane at a mechanical outpost on Odo Island. Now, you may be wondering how a kamikaze pilot is able to land—shouldn’t he be all blowed up?—and you’d be right. Shikishima-san lost his nerve, claiming his plane had mechanical issues.³ But really, the Japanese were losing and he didn’t see the need to sacrifice his own life for the honor of the empire. File this away for later, because honor is a big part of Japanese culture⁴ and this unwillingness to carry out his assigned duty, though logical, eats at Shikishima.

On Odo Island, mechanic Sosaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) sympathizes with Shikishima and basically wants him to be all right. However, that night the outpost gets attacked by a gigantic dinosaur from the sea, none other than the one, the only, Gojira! He’s big but not skyscraper-sized, yet still wreaks terrible destruction on the outpost.

Tachibana mentions that the locals call the creature Godzilla, and it’s just a thing viewers have to accept. And we do. Somehow it works. I appreciated that the movie gives us the big guy only a few minutes in, and they’ve done something great: they made Godzilla terrifying again. And this is his mildest appearance! I can’t believe this movie was made for only $15 million. Everything looks really good.

Everybody but Shikishima and Tachibana is killed because once again Shikishima lost his nerve and was unable to use his plane’s gun to shoot the beast. And thus we set up our central man vs. monster conflict. This time, it’s personal!

It’s hard to underscore how good this movie is until you see it. Writing about it, it sounds so ridiculous, but the performances sell the drama and the horror, the writing is lean and powerful, and you find yourself sucked in by the human drama so much that the monster drama almost becomes a B story.

Anyway, Shikishima gets back to Tokyo and finds it in ruins. His home lay amidst the rubble of other bombed out wreckage. He learns from his neighbor Sumiko Ota (Sakura Ando) that his parents are dead. Sumiko is very upset to see Shikishima alive—he dishonored Japan by failing to sacrifice himself, and in the raw days after Japan’s surrender, men like Shikishima are blamed for Japan’s defeat.

We follow Shikishima as he attempts to put his life together. One day a baby is thrust into his arms by a young woman who is fleeing someone accusing her of stealing food. Later, the woman, Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe), finds Shikishima and baby Akiko (Sae Nagatani). Noriko promised Akiko’s dying mother she would care for her daughter, and through fate a duty-bound Shikishima agrees to watch both woman and child. What follows is a sequence where we see the three of them, and Japan in general, try to get back on their feet.

Of course, there’s a giant monster out there causing problems for both the Japanese and the Americans. The Americans tested a bomb which, if you know your Godzilla lore, only makes the creature stronger. And with the U.S. unwilling to perform any naval maneuvers in the Pacific due to Cold War tensions, it’s up to Japan to fend for itself.

Praising his good luck, Shikishima gets a well-paying job on a minesweeping boat. His crew will steer one of two small wooden vessels (the mines are magnetic) with a chain between them. On the chain is a blade, which will cut the mine’s mooring, allowing it to come to the surface. Once up, the team blasts the mine with a 16mm gun from a safe distance.

The crew consists of an old salt (“The Captain”), a former scientist (“The Doc”) and a young buck (“The Kid”). They all have names, of course, but I like these nicknames better. Turns out none of them are good shots with the gun, but Shikishima is. Apparently he was a good dogfighter, just a bad suicide pilot.

So of course, being at sea, Shikishima and his friends are bound to run into the monster, and the encounter with Godzilla here is absolutely harrowing. I felt something I hadn’t in a long time as a moviegoer—genuine fear that the protagonists could not win. Now that I like all the characters, including Shikishima’s three fellow crew members/friends, I hated every time the monster showed up. That’s how you do genre.

The monster looks really good. They didn’t mess with the classic design, and the only addition I can see is a cool effect whenever Godzilla is charging up his breath attack.

I don’t want to spoil the movie any further so here are some quick hits:

• The obligatory scene where Godzilla rampages through Tokyo is spectacular. You ache for these people.

• The plan to fight the beast is ingenious and fits perfectly with the movie. It’s surprising but not jarring.

• Shikishima’s internal conflict and his hatred of Godzilla are related and make their final showdown about so much more than simply saving the day.

• The ending is slightly predictable but not egregiously so. Another way that this movie would likely be unfilmable by an American studio: there is not a hint of nihilism or despair.

Godzilla, like all movie monsters, is both what it is and the representation of something else, something deeper. In the original Godzilla, the monster was very obviously a symbol for mankind’s destructive technology. In other movies, Godzilla became a good guy, which I mean, it’s fun to see him punch other giant monsters but most of those movies I’ve seen, while enjoyable, are dumb.⁵ To be fair, two dudes in rubber monster suits beating each other up is pretty awesome.

Here, Godzilla is less a punishment for mankind’s dabbling where he should not, and more of a symbol of Shikishima’s shame, dishonor, anxiety, and fear. Shikishima blames himself for Japan losing the war, for the death of those men on Odo Island, and for being unable to move on with his life and accept happiness and joy. This makes Godzilla Minus One an intensely personal movie, which is why I think it both works, and has become such a phenomenon.

It is very interesting that one of the least religious, and certainly least Christian countries, on the planet absolutely nails the themes of forgiveness and redemption. These aren’t Christianity-exclusive concepts, but let’s be real: Christianity is the only religion that makes forgiveness and redemption thecentral themes. To use a played-out expression, there is nary a whiff of woke to be found.

This brings us to Godzilla Minus One’s politics. Ah, politics, scourge or a nation. Political zealots and the demon-possessed have a lot in common: they seem normal enough but start foaming at the mouth when certain subjects are broached. Both also recoil in pain at the mere mention of the holy name of Jesus Christ. Very curious.

So politics: you will root for Japan and the Japanese. Yes, they were the U.S.’s enemies in the war, but they are people just like us. And they deserve forgiveness and redemption just like we all do. There are a few statements made by characters about how cheaply Japan’s wartime leaders viewed human life, and other statements about how lucky those who did not fight were, about how war is not this glamorous thing many cultures are often taught it is, but they are not glaring or gratuitous and—here’s the thing—they are in character and fit with the story.

From another political perspective, and in what might be its most subversive aspect, Godzilla Minus One is a very masculine story, unabashedly so. The characters are willing to sacrifice everything to save their homeland and their people. This isn’t a fight for world salvation, but for Japan. And it is all men doing the fighting. Historical accuracy, perhaps? Or a reflection of a society that doesn’t view women as cannon-fodder? It’s an interesting contrast to us round-eyes and our rush to send our daughters to the front lines to die just like the boys do! Equality is men and women being tossed into the meat grinder to die for rich people in foreign lands. And Americans are the ones calling the Japanese weird . . .

This is how you do genre!

I can’t believe I’m gushing so much about a monster movie, but we live in interesting times.

- Alexander

Help fuel my writing habit by fueling my caffeine habit and buy me a coffee.

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I did genre right⁶ in my sci-fi/sword-and-planet trilogy The Swordbringer. Before I got to the aliens and monsters and battles, I got the characters and themes on point so that the action has meaning. Check them out and let me know how I did.

1. Stick with me, please.

2. Not much, really.

3. Mechanical issues on a kamikaze plane don’t seem worth fixing, but I digress.

4. I’m no expert on Japanese culture, nor do I claim to be. All I know about Japan’s honor culture, especially during World War II, comes from books written by Americans and Europeans about World War II. Please be gentle with me.

5. And what was up with those tiny women?

6. At least I think so.