A Battle to Live: Godzilla Minus One
Godzilla Minus One was my favorite movie of 2024. I've been trying to write about it for half a year.
I should start by saying I am biased. As a kid, I was a huge Godzilla fan. I watched Godzilla vs. Mothra so many times that the VHS started to deteriorate, rainbow diagonals bleeding across the screen. My parents somehow found me a Godzilla and Mothra playset for an early birthday–basically two small action figures with a cardboard background you could prop up–which I loved. I liked the movies where Godzilla was a good guy, too–like Destroy All Monsters, which was really the Avengers: Endgame of my childhood in terms of how many characters it brings in for a victory lap. I remember seeing the 1998 American Godzilla and wondering why on earth people didn't like it. Sure, Godzilla is smaller in that one, and she (the 1998 Godzilla is female, a major plot point in the movie) dies kind of tragically, a weirdly melancholic ending for a movie that was otherwise trying to ride the post Jurassic Park dino-craze (you can see it in the revisions to Godzilla's design in that). But she also climbs all over New York and fights a submarine. It was cool.
As an adult, yes, the American WB films left me perhaps a little cold. The 2014 reboot is fine, and it was especially awesome to see Godzilla nuclear mouth-to-mouth a big bad spidery monster, but it was never really clear to me where they were trying to land in terms of tone. Until the latest of the American-made productions, the WB/Legendary "Monsterverse" films veered wildly all over the spectrum from sincere and serious to schlocky but fun. The 2014 film was sold almost entirely based on Ken Watanabe epicly pronouncing "Let them fight" in the trailer, and the rest of the movie doesn't live up to that same kind of grandiosity. I was happy to see my childhood friend Mothra return in 2019's King of the Monsters, but by the time Kong was supposedly fighting Godzilla I was firmly out. You can do that, but you can't make me take it seriously. Stop trying to make Godzilla and Kong happen. Kong is famous for climbing a building. A single, solitary building. Godzilla levels whole cities every time he hops down to the 7-11 for an Arizona iced tea.
Takashi Yamazaki knows exactly where his own Godzilla Minus One falls on the shlock-to-serious spectrum; it's dead serious.
The film's main character, Kōichi Shikishima, is a WWII kamikaze pilot near the end of the war who fails to complete his suicide run. Shortly thereafter, he encounters a young Godzilla and fails again – this time to pull the trigger on the monster as Big G stomps across an airfield, killing nearly all the soldiers stationed there. Shikishima is traumatized, like any soldier might be, but also wracked by horrific survivors' guilt. In the ruins of the war, he ends up raising a child with Minami Hamabe's Noriko Ōishi, but can never fully commit to the relationship–because, it becomes clear, he feels that he should have died. The actor, Ryunosuke Kamiki, is all-in on this character's trauma even before Godzilla returns, mutated by the atomic testing of Operation Crossroads to become a huge, aggressive city-wrecking beast.
Minus One won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and for obvious reasons. Godzilla is fantastic in this film. The sound design is amazing, and all of us in the theater lost our minds when he first unleashes his nuclear breath…until the film goes quiet and shows us the devastating aftermath, ruined streets and collapsed, charred buildings that of course invoke the aftermath of the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This Godzilla is slow, plodding, undeniable, full of menace.
What elevates this above other recent Godzilla outings is that it has a theme, perhaps even a moral. A good story doesn't need a moral, and many writers wiser than myself have argued effectively that setting out with a lesson in mind for your fiction is a surefire way to make it didactic at best and, at worst, scolding, self-important, and boring. But the 2014 Godzilla, the best of the American-produced outings, suffers from being pretty much "about nothing"–as author and Godzilla-expert Steve Ryfle commented in his review at the time.
Nobody could leave Minus One thinking it was about nothing.
Somehow, the movie manages a perfect balance between the titular monster's screen time and that of our human characters–always a struggle for a kaiju movie. The monster got us in the door, but we need to care about the humans, and that means we need some focus for their feelings. This is a deeply emotional movie.
It would be reductive to say that Minus One is just about survivor's guilt, though every single character seems to suffer from it, to some extent. Every man in the film either fought in the war or, in one memorable case, was too young to participate and (naively) wishes they could have fought. Every woman has lost family and friends, and has had to scrape by to survive. Everyone is struggling. And Shikishima, seeing this, wants only to die heroically, as if dying could help make up for his own survival and the horrors his country has endured. It's not subtle. He says: "What if I'm really dead already? I died long ago on that island and lie rotting." And, perhaps dipping into melodrama, he explains that he cannot marry Ōishi because, "My war isn't over yet."
Maybe the reason Minus One hits is also that it feels, despite taking place in 1947, very much a movie of our historical moment. It is still tied firmly to the aftermath of the atomic bombs, as the original film was. But by committing to its historical time and place, it's able to comment on our own. (I'm of the mind that the American-made films do seem…a little troubling in general, as a piece of art, when you think about how the U.S. dropped the bombs that killed a quarter-million Japanese people, and the original Godzilla is a response to this, but…I digress.)
There is actually good reason to believe that the world will, in many ways, get better. Despite the rising tide of facism in the U.S., there's glimmers of hope. Recent polling outline in the NYTimes indicates that more Americans than ever on both sides of the aisle have lost faith in free markets–a first step towards a better economic model than the one that is currently destroying the planet and its peoples. There's been great advances in green energy (even if climate activists correctly point out that expanding the grid is meaningless without reduction of fossil fuels). And as a teacher, I see young people motivated by great moral clarity and courage. I can't despair.
That said, the world is also gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets better. That seems pretty uncontroversial. Between climate change, genocidal oligarchs, massive misinformation, a Republican party in the U.S. that has now fully embraced bigotry as its guiding principle, and the ravages of tech robber barons and private equity crooks stripping our planet for parts—yeah, nobody I know feels super excited for the rest of this century, ya know?
It's easy, when I think about all this, to hope for a simple, easy act of heroism that gets to define your life after the fact. A blaze of glory. And history is full of folks who went out in such a fashion and did make a meaningful difference. In 2011, hundreds of elderly Japanese men and women heroically risked their lives to wade into the Fukushima nuclear disaster and help clean up the mess; at least two of these elderly workers died. John Brown's body is moldering in the grave but his soul is marching on, as the song goes.
But history is also full of people who lived, and usually that means they had to work a lot harder, for a longer period of time. The magnitude of a sacrifice, sadly, doesn't guarantee the magnitude of its outcome.
This isn't to say that we should wash our hands of civic duty. At risk of sounding like a neoliberal shill, I really do think that a refusal to vote is always a vote for the possible worst consequences of an election; we have a responsibility to choose the lesser of two evils, no matter how repugnant. An election is not a marriage but a bus ride, etc., etc. Plato says, "One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” I would add that such refusal also damns your peers to be governed by tyrants.
At the same time, Minus One argues, survival is its own kind of victory. Our allegiance is not to any government in itself but to the people it claims to represent. A semi-retired naval captain ends up leading a small, hobbled-together independent armada to stop Godzilla; Shikishima is our main character, but the effort to stop Godzilla is piecemeal, led by a band of survivors brought together out of desperation. In other words, community organizing. Before battling the monster, the navy captain says: "We can't rely on the US or Japanese government. So the future of this country is in our hands."
The problem in our world is that we need to take this mindset and scale it up. In some ways, Godzilla is more manageable than the problems that plague our world because of his locality. Godzilla is only ever in one place. Capitalism and autocracy are everywhere.
Godzilla Minus One is, to be clear, loads of fun. The film doesn't revel in slapstick, but takes its images seriously enough that moments of wonder and levity feel well-earned. The score, which remixes some of the original 1954 Godzilla theme, is often stately and recognizable as the "Imperial March" in Star Wars. And when we watched Godzilla's huge, mutated spines first break through the ocean waves, a young man in the seat in front of me turned to his friend and whispered, "That's my boy." I watched the film with dear friends, and this also made the movie that much more enjoyable. When Shikishima gets in a plane again to help stall Godzilla's march on Tokyo, people were pumping their fists in the air. At least, I was.
But I really do think I enjoyed Minus One mostly for its kairos–the ancient Greek concept of the "right time." The end of our systems, for better and for worse, seems guaranteed even in the best case scenarios. The global order that survives climate change and capitalism and fascism will not resemble the world we know today. But that does not mean it is not worth fighting for, or that our strategies should only be those of self-denial. Shikishima's mentor-figure in the film, an older coworker, addresses the gathered civilian force as they prepare to do battle with Godzilla: "This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future."
