Godzilla Is Inside All of Us

It seems absurd at this late date to be rediscovering the depth of metaphor in Ishiro Honda's Godzilla. Godzilla has been an icon of world cinema for seventy years, an embassador for international moviemaking in spite of the derision his films have sometimes received. After years of interpretations have pulled Godzilla out of the realm of metaphor and into the world of monster versus monster wrestling fights, that original nightmare born of the hydrogen bomb has faded into memory, but it hasn't vanished completely. Godzilla's home studio, Toho Pictures, has been leasing Godzilla to American studios for years at this point, and Americans don't have that memory of atomic destruction. They see in Godzilla a franchise to exploit, like good little imperial capitalists. Art isn't even in the equation. When it happens at all, it's purely by accident. Every so often, Toho makes a film of their own to keep their hand in and remind the world who owns Godzilla. On the occasion of Godzilla's seventieth year, they've taken Godzilla back to his roots. The result, Godzilla Minus One (2023, directed by Takashi Yamazaki), is an astonishment, a film that can stand not only with the original film from 1954, but as one of the best fantasy films ever made, full stop. It's certainly one of the best films of 2023. It's the real thing. It's a film with something meaningful to say about history and nation and the human heart in conflict with itself. It's a film that the makers of the American "Monsterverse" films should look at with dismay and shame and envy.

The film opens near the end of World War II, as a pilot lands at the remote garrison on Odo Island. This is Kōichi Shikishima, a Kamikaze pilot who has fled his duty on the pretext that his plane is faulty, but really because he doesn't want to die. He thinks of himself as a coward. The head mechanic at the Odo airfield is Lt. Tachibana, who suspects Shikashima, and is initially understanding. The war is coming to an end. One more useless death won't change anything. As he stews in his shame at the water's edge, Shikishima sees strange fish washing ashore. Later, after the sun has set, something else comes ashore, a gigantic reptilian monster. Tachibana tells Shikishima that the locals have a legend about just such a creature. They call him "Godzilla." As the beast wrecks the garrison, Tachibana orders Shikishima to get in his plane and use his 20mm guns on the creature. Shikishima manages to get to his cockpit, but when the monster is in his sights, he freezes. His terror incapacitates him. Godzilla then wrecks the entire garrison, killing every man except Tachibana and Shikishima. On the troop ship home after Japan's surrender, Tachibana gives Shikishima a packet containing photographs of every man who died with their families and loved ones. It's a harsh rebuke, one Shikishima believes he entirely deserves. At home in the ruins of Tokyo, Shikishima finds his parents house destroyed. Like most of the neighborhood, his parents burned in the firebombing. Their neighbor, Sumiko, is similarly grieving. She spots Shikishima's cowardice right away and blames his failure for the deaths of her children. At the open air soup kitchen near his home, Shikishima encounters Noriko, a woman running from a mob who believes she is a thief. She shoves a baby in Shikishima's arms and vanishes in the crowd. Shikishima doesn't know what to do with the child. He considers abandoning it in the market square, but his guilt prevents him. As he leaves with the baby, Noriko rejoins him to take the child and then follows him home. She has nowhere to go. Her family is dead, too. The child is not hers, but a burden given to her by the baby's dying mother. They make a life together, though Shikishima keeps her at a distance. His war isn't over. Shikishima eventually finds work on a minesweeper, a wooden boat tasked with disarming the aquatic mines placed around Japan during the war. It's dangerous work, which suits Shikishima and his growing death wish. In the meantime, the Americans begin exploding nuclear bombs at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The creature from Odo Island is bathed in the radiation and mutates.

In Tokyo, Noriko takes a job with an office in the Ginza area of the city, intent on self-sufficiency if Shikishima refuses to marry her. The Japanese and American authorities track some force that is wrecking shipping and send Shikishima's minesweeper crew to investigate under the aegis of Mr. Nodo, a former weapons maker. When they find a wrecked American battleship, Mr. Nodo tells his crewmates that they are a delaying action to slow the creature's progress before the battleship Takao can intercept. Unfortunately, the creature--the same creature from Odo Island that has been haunting Shikashima's dreams--appears first, and the mine sweeper has to use all its resources and ingenuity to outrun Godzilla. They are rescued by the Takao, but the Takao is insufficient. Godzilla shrugs off its firepower and eventually destroys it with an eruption of atomic fire. The minesweeper escapes, though. Godzilla makes landfall in Tokyo and lays waste to the Ginza area where Noriko is on a train home. She survives Godzilla's destruction of the train and flees on foot, where Shikishima finds her. When Godzilla unleashes his atomic ray, Noriko pushes Shikishima to safety, but is caught in the shockwave and vanishes. As Shikishima is grieving yet another loss, Mr. Noda invites him to a citizen's committee to combat Godzilla in the absence of help from the government or the Americans. Mr. Noda, it seems, has a plan for killing Godzilla, and Shikishima has a central role to play...

In most Godzilla movies, the human stories are filler between monster rampages. Not so, this film. This has characters who are sharply delineated, with complex relationships and comprehensible motivations. The story of a shamed Kamikaze pilot wandering in the ruins of Tokyo after the war is the kind of story you might find in the art films of the early 1950s, perhaps directed by Keisuke Kinoshita. The heart of the film isn't Godzilla himself, but the trio of orphans trying to remake their lives. Shikashima and Noriko are both profoundly damaged at the outset--Shikashima more than Noriko--and the relationship between them, the family they form, pulls them both from the abyss. The theme of a found family coming together in the wreckage comes right out of a Hirokazu Kore'eda film, a link strengthened by the presence of Kore'eda regular Sakura Ando as Sumiko. Another influence: the finely detailed caricatures of the crew of the minesweeper might come from a Miyazaki movie--particularly Mr. Noda, a kindly genius, and Mr. Akitsu, the minesweeper's pacifist captain. The aerial sequences at the end of the film featuring an unusual aircraft also show the influence of Miyazaki. This film casts a wide net for its influences. It is a film that's ambitious in spite of its genre. The result is characters the audience identifies with and cares about, even in scenes where there is barely a whiff of fantasy. It roots these characters in a stark reality and lets their humanity carry the film. My partner asked me if all Japanese films were as emotional as this one is. I think rather that it is emotional without the cynical irony of American films. It's an unabashed melodrama and it works marvelously in that key.

Godzilla Minus One is a film that is conscious of and careful about the politics it's playing with. Given the disaster of World War II, it could adopt a more nationalistic tone about military honor and the lost cause of Japanese imperialism. It teeters that way from time to time with its emphasis on the duty of the Kamikaze pilots to the nation. The film's initial set piece is a reframing of part of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah from the 1990s, which also has a World War II island garrison encounter a proto-Godzilla. That film embraces a reconstructed glorious Japanese empire and Godzilla defends Japan from American forces. It's a disastrous sequence in a wrong-headed film. Throughout this film, however, there is an emphasis on survival. The Americans never make an appearance in this film. Its gaze is inward at Japan's own faults. All of its characters are dealing with survivor's guilt, none more than Shikishima. When Shikishima is given his chance to fulfill the mission of the kamikaze, he chooses an alternate option, in the hopes of living for the future. The film accepts the culpability of the Japanese state for wasting an entire generation, and the resentment that instills in its survivors. When the film ultimately abandons the idea of a state solution to Godzilla in favor of a volunteer force of veterans, it chooses this direction. An American film in the contemporary climate might choose this as a libertarian rebuke to the inertia of big government*, but this film's disillusion with government has been earned by a different kind of firestorm kindled in fascism and empire. The upside of its ending is a nation by and for the people. It sows the seeds of democracy. This theme, presented at a time of rising authoritarianism and nationalism worldwide, is why the film is relevant even as a period piece. It's talking about the past, sure. Japan's past. But it's also talking about the present. It's talking to the countries of the world that haven't been through the nuclear holocaust and utter destruction that Japan endured in the name of authoritarianism.

Godzilla Minus One is the most terrifying of all Godzilla movies, not excluding the original item. Godzilla's first appearance here is a nightmare of claws and teeth coming out of the night to murder exhausted soldiers. When Godzilla wades ashore in Ginza, all of the elements of a traditional Godzilla rampage through Tokyo are there, but the filmmakers have shifted the point of view a bit. Almost all Godzilla movies film such scenes from a god's eye-view. This one puts the point of view on the ground level, among the terrified victims of the rampage. This is a film that shows people being trampled by Godzilla. We see the attack on the commuter train from the point of view of Noriko, a character we've gotten to know, then see Godzilla and the mushroom cloud that comes from his atomic breath from Shikishima's point of view. Even the requisite destruction of buildings is intensified by placing a news crew on top of one of them, and we watch in horror as they keep their posts to the last. Because an audience actually empathizes with the human characters--they are not cardboard stand-ups included to give the special effects scale--there is an extra investment in their fates in the face of a cosmic horror. One of my favorite shots in the film is the dismay Mr. Noda feels when it's clear to him that his plan hasn't worked, that Godzilla is still alive and is going to destroy them all. The other element that ramps up panic in an audience is the score by Naoki Satō, which blends a mournful chorale with Akira Ifukube's original Godzilla music to merciless effect.

I've heard some grumbling among some of my movie friends that very end of the movie bumps the film down a notch because it's shamelessly tear-jerky. I'm sympathetic to this complaint and may have felt similarly after my first viewing. After my second--I saw the black and white "Minus Color" edition a few days before writing this--I no longer have any qualms about it. It's of a piece with the themes of the film. Necessary for them, even. Let's be honest here: misery and despair aren't inherently more realistic than hope and happiness. This is something other cinematic traditions haven't forgotten. Their melodramas are unashamed. I hope our own American cinema relearns it one day.

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*By focusing on a corporate bureaucracy dealing with a contemporary encounter with Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One's immediate predecessor, Shin Godzilla, makes exactly this point.

Note: the title of this post comes from the closing scene of Godzilla 2000: Millennium. It's my second favorite Godzilla quote. That movie isn't nearly as good as Godzilla Minus One, but it's the first instance of Toho getting irritated with the American versions of Godzilla and taking their ball back home.

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