Godzilla Minus One

Godzilla Minus One is a tremendous addition to the Toho canon, demonstrating once again that when properly leveraged franchises can be used to tell enthralling and distinct stories. Yes, it has its eponymous kaiju trampling through the city, coming up from the depths, but his tales are more than 40 stories long. Their quality varies, but despite the negative in its title, Minus One is one of the high points.

In late 1944 Koichi Shikishima pilots his Mitsubishi A6M to a badly damaged runway on Odo Island. He has returned after an unsuccessful tokubetsu kōgekitai mission. That's most often translated (and subtitled) as 'kamikaze' but that form doesn't appear in the dialogue. Koichi will return to a Tokyo that's in ruins, flattened by the fiery breath of a different monster, General Curtis LeMay.

Played by Ryunosuke Kamiki, he is often wracked with survivor's guilt, and often bears the burden of others, knowing he survived despite it being his mission not to. Kamiki is an industry veteran, part of the casts of more than a hundred works including a lot of domestic television but also anime that saw worldwide audiences, like Suzume and Your Name. In chaotic post-war Japan he ends up holding the future in his hands, at least until he's able to return the infant Ariko to Noriko (Minami Hamabe). She was in Shin Kamen Rider, part of a sequence of reimaginings that includes Godzilla themselves. I was on the fence about Shin Godzilla but Minus One tramples over any sticking points.

It's full of references to what will be Godzilla. Some are more explicit than others. Odo Island is mentioned in the original but you've got to know that Freon is an amalgam of ozone-depleting substances and so past that layer of chemistry becomes an oxygen destroyer. There are even deeper references to other media. An American submarine (USS Redfish) is named in one report, that vessel with some cosmetic modifications portrayed the Nautilus in the approximately contemporary 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Another vehicle with an extensive media career is the Kyushu J7W1 Shinden. An unflown prototype, the 'Magnificent Lightning', stayed on the drawing boards in countless anime and manga. With the help of chief mechanic Sosaku Tachibana they get it into the air. Munetaka Aoki's debut role was in Battle Royale II but Minus One carries a different legacy of the war and its reconstruction.

Writer/director/special effects (supervisor) Takashi Yamazaki isn't quite wearing the same size of hats as Gareth Edwards did on Monsters before he got the keys to Godzilla but he is at least as worthy of the driving seat. He is no stranger to established franchises but this puts a new spin on something we've already seen.

There are details smaller than names of ships painted on their sides but they're appropriately disarmed and at least one would have been available at the time, There's mention of US-Soviet tensions and that leads to this being a private enterprise. State failure and clandestine operations add to the weight of a film that's got all manner of difficult topics smuggled in a Trojan horse with an collectible-figure-ready play-feature.

The action sequences are thrilling. Having paid the premium to see this in IMAX the real benefit wasn't that everything was massive on screen but that I could feel the sound. If you stay through the credits you'll hear the classic theme and that unmistakable roar but the wait for both of them to appear as the film unfolds is one of several sources of tension. That flattened wall of sound makes it all the more striking when things fall silent, and much like in Jaws there's plenty going on even when the monster isn't on the screen. A lot of that is what appears to be domestic drama, the processes of finding food, family, fortune, forgiveness. That lens of looming catastrophe and everything left in its wake casts everything else into relief. When Godzilla Minus One shines it is devastating.

I have very little to say that's as negative as its numbering. Even the co-ordinates given seem right. The subtitling got fiddly in places, but there's at least one exchange where a question was reframed so that the answer included a nodded "no". That still worked. The creature effects are as one would hope, but doing anything in an aquatic environment is difficult and while you can't quite see the strings there are still some moments where you can see the joins. That's a small bone to pick in what's a phenomenal Godzilla movie. Which might be the problem.

I don't know how much you'd get out of it if you weren't already a Godzilla fan. I think it'd be a perfect starting point, far more approachable to modern audiences than the original and far better than many of the later cash-ins. There's a pretty affecting meditation on post-war Japan, and a different one than the original, on recovery from trauma, from grief, from guilt. It's hard to ignore metaphor when it's this big though. Colossal is much the same. It is a prequel, and the quality of those varies wildly. For every Wonka there is a Solo and the quality varies further than whether they are musicals or self indulgent noodling. Having seen it with the number one Godzilla-liker of my acquaintance, they were delighted, and I hugely enjoyed myself too. I know someone who's seen it three times in cinemas already, and if festive scheduling allows I'm hoping to catch it at least once more myself. Among a slew of prequels Godzilla Minus One towers head and shoulders above the rest.