'Godzilla Minus One' Restores the King's Terrible Majesty

Godzilla emerged as a creature of atomic horror, and quickly became a goofy hero. I adore Ishirō Honda’s 1954 original film Godzilla, but I was curious how that movie led to the other Godzilla, which is a creature who fights other monsters, and typically comes off as heroic. I spent pretty much all of March 2021 going through Criterion’s Godzilla box set, which covers the character’s Showa-era exploits from 1954-1975. And while the films are modestly entertaining with some entries being better than others (I’m partial to Destroy All Monsters and Invasion of Astro Monster), you can see how quickly Godzilla went from being a figure of horror to one of kitsch, fun, and harmless entertainment.

Stateside, Godzilla has had a resurgence thanks to Legendary’s “monsterverse” starting with Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla in 2014. While I really wanted to enjoy these movies, I keep finding them somewhat underwhelming. Godzilla is the best of the bunch, but suffers from bizarre plot turns that undermine the central tension for the human characters. However, I admire how it tries to thread the needle of keeping Godzilla terrifying while also having him fight other monsters. Its sequel, King of the Monsters, is a bit of a dud as it gets too wrapped up in the human machinations without really finding a strong story at the center. Godzilla vs. Kong is fun and colorful, but it’s also pretty disposable, so in that way, it feels pretty in line with a lot of the Showa-era stuff. But the guiding thesis of the Monsterverse is to sprinkle in some horror elements while keeping you firmly on the side of the title monster.

Takashi Yamazaki's prequel to the original Godzilla, Godzilla Minus One, doesn’t want you to like Godzilla, and that’s why it’s brilliant.

The Symbolic Monster

When you go back to the 1954 Godzilla, part of why the film is so compelling is you can see a country wrestling with what it means to be the only people in the world to have suffered a nuclear attack. The sheer scale of the devastation boggles the mind and doesn’t seem of this world, hence transferring onto a giant lizard who rampages through cities, can’t be stopped, reasoned with, or defeated with conventional weapons. The moral issue at the heart of the movie is whether it’s okay to use a new weapon, the Oxygen Destroyer, to defeat Godzilla, even though that will lead to the new weapon’s proliferation. Godzilla exists because of nuclear testing, and the film keeps an eye out for something worse—weapons created by humans. The dark heart of Godzilla is that despite all the devastation created by the monster, the movie acknowledges that Godzilla exists because of humans, and that humans can create something even worse than Godzilla.

That bleak undercurrent of trauma is the foundation of Godzilla Minus One, and it’s why the film is so effective. The movie follows Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) who feels like his life has been marred by cowardice. He was a kamikaze pilot who feigned technical difficulties, landed on Odo Island for repairs only to encounter Godzilla. However, when he has the opportunity to use his plane’s heavy guns on Godzilla, he freezes in terror, which leads to almost all the engineers on the island getting killed by the monster. He returns home only to find himself in an odd relationship with fellow orphan Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and an orphaned infant, Akiko. None of them are related by blood, but they’re bound together by the horrors of war and the need to survive.

Shikishima goes to work as a minesweeper so he can support his new found family, and it’s here where Godzilla rises again and starts destroying boats as well as cities. In this way, Godzilla becomes a specter of death for Shikishima. It’s a looming reminder not only of his survivor’s guilt, but also that the death he’s been running from is inescapable. But the film also relies on knowing that perhaps death—or at least the deaths that Shikishima ran from—isn’t inherently some honorable thing. Being a kamikaze pilot wouldn’t have won the war for Japan, and firing guns from his plane wouldn’t have saved anyone on Odo. Shikishima’s life has been a matter of being told what he needs to die for, but his journey of discovery is finding what’s worth living for: Noriko, Akiko, and their neighbor Sumiko (Sakura Ando) as well as his friends on the minesweeping ship.

To accomplish this realization, it’s not simply that Shikishima forges relationships, but that Godzilla must be truly terrifying. The film can’t cheapen the horror Godzilla represents because that’s the death that Shikishima’s both running from and haunted by. It’s incredible that Yamazaki has, through his prequel, wound the character back to 1954 when he’s a horrifying figure rather than a cuddly, cultural icon. When Godzilla rampages in Godzilla Minus One, it’s not exhilarating. When he powered up his atomic breath, I wasn’t excited that he was about to go off like I was in 2014’s Godzilla. I was scared. The way Yamazaki shoots the movie and what he does on a relatively limited budget (especially compared to the recent Legendary efforts) is astounding because he conveys not only the size of the beast, but his threat.

For most of the character’s life, Godzilla has been defanged because people like him that way. It’s easier to sell and embrace a monster who’s on your side. Even in trying to make Godzilla more threatening, the Monsterverse movies come down on the side of “Godzilla as grumpy protector” where humans are his pets, and while he doesn’t really like us, he’ll destroy any monster that seeks to do us harm. Godzilla Minus One, wisely recognizing that making Godzilla “unlikable” won’t diminish his cultural cache. We can make him an unforgiving killer without losing his appeal or preventing some future filmmaker from having him do monster fights again. In Godzilla Minus One, he is back to being a symbol for the fears and anxieties of the human characters, and that’s what makes the film far more potent.

I don’t want to say that other Godzilla movies have “missed” the point of the character. I don’t think Godzilla necessarily endures as a cultural icon if you only make movies about him representing various threats to humanity. And there’s nothing inherently wrong about making a bunch of fun films where he fights other monsters. But none of those movies have the staying power or the punch of Godzilla Minus One, which shows that Godzilla isn’t at his best when he’s some external force, but when he reflects our fears back to us.