Director: Takashi Yamazaki
Writers: Takashi Yamazaki
Stars: Minami Hamabe, Ryunosuke Kamiki, Sakura Ando

In post-war Japan, on the brink of economic and moral collapse, a disgraced kamikaze pilot finds himself at the center of an emerging existential threat as a nuclear-powered lizard roams over the land…

As a lifelong Godzilla fan, I find it remarkable how a franchise so auspicious can manage such sustained success. It is one thing for a giant monster to still capture a sense of awe in audiences, but it is another thing entirely that such films can still manage to surprise.

Godzilla Minus One is one of the most surprising films of the year, not in how it captures an imaginative spectacle, but in how it channels that backdrop into a poignant and remarkably earnest journey of discovering one’s self-worth.

Whereas the titular antagonist acts as an impassioned anguish, furiously mashing over the war-torn nation with a God-like penance punishing those who failed to fight for themselves, our central cast of characters must band together in order to rebuke the ideology that left them so defeated to defeat the literal monster in tandem with the metaphorical one. Movies of this kind are rarely so articulate about their allegorical conceits.

In fact, it often takes die-hard fans to truly dissect their earnest intent (to this day, I will still argue that Mechagodzilla is a manifestation of the bastardization of colonial industrialization). But Godzilla Minus One manages to prove the exception to the rule in its ability to effortlessly translate its themes for the audience.

Especially in a day in age where governmental ideologies seem to lean farther and farther away from the will of individuals in favor of placating to often immoral, opportunistic fringe groups, it seems only right that Godzilla Minus One would allegorically challenge the government’s diminishment of the will of the people.

The thematic relevance of Godzilla Minus One triumphantly propels the narrative and characters to an upper echelon of disaster movies, and all of that is not even scratching the surface of the film’s true mastery of its genre aesthetics. The visual effects, often meticulously crafted by a team involving the very same director, Takashi Yamazaki, who made the film possible, achieve every element of awe-inspiring spectacle that some of the most lavish Hollywood films today could only wish to capture, and yet Godzilla Minus One is made for a fraction of a fraction of the budget of those same Hollywood contemporaries.

But it is not simply the mastery within the work itself (the design of the titular monster even taking care to delicately reimagine its movement to be tight and rigid in homage to its original predecessor); rather, it is in how the film uses it. The nuclear blast of Godzilla’s atomic breath has never looked so visceral, so harrowing, but the way it is framed as Godzilla cries to the sky amidst a mushroom cloud that plagues the area as a biblical condemnation brings chills to the ground-level perspective where the audience is forced to bare witness.

A movie of such calculated bombast rarely, if ever, captures such heart-palpitating awe as the Jaws-inspired boat chase sequence that ratchets up the tension with deft, ground-level panic. Godzilla Minus One is not just a masterclass in good character work influencing provocative themes, but it also acts as a perfect depiction of character translating stakes to the audience.

Unlike many other films in this story franchise, the audience cares about the danger these characters are in because their stories matter. And though Minus One may misstep at times, often using contrivances of cutaways to try to surprise an audience in its third act rather than consistently saddling them with these characters, it should be praised how earnestly the fight for survival translates in this story that could have so easily cashed in on being just another monster movie.