Back in the wreckage of Tokyo Koichi fails to find his family whose house is entirely at street level but gets involved with a young woman who has just saved a baby from a bomb site. Back at her place the story morphs into the kind of people first neo-realism Japanese cinema was good at after the war. Time passes and the pair, still not officially married, get jobs that help them climb out of their slough. She commutes to Ginza for an office job. He gets good hazard pay cleaning up American mines in the ocean. He has nightmares of the monster from the island, they haunt him like his war guilt. They are about to come true right where he lives.
Japanese cinema took decades to address its war history and the spectre of the atomic bomb bled into the least expected places like samurai movies or folk horror like Onibaba where distant clouds from battles or despoiled cities filled the medieval skies. In 1954 Ishiro Honda made Godzilla which directly dealt with the bomb and its effects, giving birth to a mythology where science in the service of warfare brought forth monsters the size of city blocks. The pushback against the monster is through an equally terrifying weapon developed during the war in Japan. The film, monster movie or not, examines the ethics of this and the emotional darkness of its potential use. The inventor needs rescue from depression, skulking in his home, hiding his face. The war and its cataclysmic finale was to keep rumbling in the cinema.
Godzilla Minus One's title refers to Japan being returned to zero by the war and plunged into the negative by Godzilla, brought forth by the war. The central notion haunting characters is how the war has left them, particularly those for whom there has bee no resolution, Like Koichi the kamikze. Godzilla's natural nuclear weaponry adds a heavy despair to the spectacle of its city-demolishing walk. That nightmarishly gigantic spectre of Hiroshima is there to return for as long as the monster can roam. Koichi getting speckled with splats of black rain while Godzilla bashes his city, is heartrending.
But this is a Kaiju movie and knows it. The humbler family scenes to begin with have their resonance and keep the stakes in our recall but Kaiju movies demand spectacle and we get just that. The huge spikes rising from the waves like a forest of shark dorsal fins are a terror. The sight of the monster rising from the waters and suckerpunching warships is powerful and thrilling. The city scenes of destruction will test your sense of vertigo as train cars are hurled through the air (one of which has a major character holding on to a rail too far above the ground to witness easily.
Gareth Edwards' 2014 U.S. reboot was a thrill, as well. I saw it in 3D and it played as you might imagine, with the action leaving everything else behind. There is a moment in it where Ken Watanabe calls the monster Gojira. Less than a minute later, one of the military types around him turn that into Godzilla and we never hear the Japanese pronunciation again. Godzilla Minus One doesn't need the translation. Nor does it need the transport to a comfort point of familiar Western settings. A Japan exhausted by war is asked to exhaust itself all over again. And as we look upon the wreckage of the bombed cities and then those devastated by monstrosity we cannot fail to recall the look of the vision leading news video for the past few years in Kiev and now Gaza City. Godzilla Minus One did not have to have those in mind when it went into production, it only had to remember the urgency of the original and repeat its plea for the people of the Earth to end the war, whichever one it happens to be, all war, finished, silence, birdsong. It is fitting that Gareth Edwards said after a screening of this film, "this is what a Godzilla movie should be like." Too bloody true.
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