Godzilla Minus One
For Japanese fighter pilot Kōichi Shikishima the return to his family home in Tokyo is only the latest step in a spiral of devastation, disillusionment and trauma, finding his neighbourhood in ruins, his parents killed in the bombing and their neighbour blaming him for still being alive when her children died, reasoning that if he had fought harder and died victory might have averted the tragedy, but Shikishima has seen the war and worse, one of only two survivors of the creature which destroyed the Japanese airfield on Odo Island which those stationed there called Gojira.
Taking in a young woman, Noriko Ōishi, and the orphaned baby Akiko that she found herself responsible for, in the ruined post-war state the only work Shikishima is able to find is as a crewman on the Shinsei Maru, a wooden minesweeper which along with its sister vessel begins the task of clearing the 60,000 magnetic mines which line the coast of Japan, the generous pay commensurate with the huge risks, but finding a ruined American battleship it is apparent there is some other terrible thing lurking in the depths which Shikishima has encountered before.
The thirty-third film in the sequence produced by the Japanese studio Toho, Godzilla Minus One (Gojira Mainasu Wan, ゴジラ-1.0) moves away from the contemporary setting of 2016’s Shin Godzilla and even further back than Ishirō Honda’s 1954 original which was set in a then-modern Tokyo, instead moving to the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Japan in physical and economic ruins and the once proud people the walking wounded, broken by the defeat of their military might and their mindset.
Starring Ryunosuke Kamiki as Shikishima, the kamikaze pilot who failed in his duty but now risks his life to reclaim his honour, Minami Hamabe as Noriko, Munetaka Aoki as Sōsaku Tachibana, the mechanic who was the only other survivor of Odo Island and Hidetaka Yoshioka as Kenji Noda, a former weapons engineer who also serves aboard Shinsei Maru under Captain Yōji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), Godzilla Minus One is written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki who also designed the special effects.
A creature awoken by nuclear blasts, the devastation caused by Gojira upon Japan has always represented the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but never before has it been made so explicit, the opening act tied directly to the aftermath of the war and set among the ruins where those who did not die scrabble to survive and the army’s later defence of Tokyo prompting the creature to unleash its heat ray, the effects of which are indistinguishable from an atomic bomb, the mushroom cloud towering over the thousands who lie dead, but the film struggles as it tries to conceive a resolution dramatically convincing and of suitable tone.
Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla having treated its titular beast as a character of purpose and motivation, Godzilla Minus One offers less, presenting a lumbering, dumb animal of rage and instinct whose limited and undeniably goofy expressions hark back to depictions from an earlier cinematic era, perhaps intended in homage but diminishing the power of what has gone before, while Noda’s plan of bubbles and balloons is not only preposterous but also poorly executed, the last-minute cavalry charge of tugboats and the miraculous resurrection of an apparently dead character shifting the pitch firmly and irretrievably from honest human drama to kaiju movie megacheese.
Godzilla Minus One is on general release and also screening in IMAX
