Review: "Godzilla Minus One" Is a Fantastic Monster Movie And a Bad Drama

Godzilla's latest global smash is a dazzling testament to leaving well enough alone.

December 31, 2023

On September 30, 2004, the New York Yankees clinched their 7th consecutive American League East division title on a walk-off home run by Bernie Williams. The team won the World Series in 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000, and additional American League Pennants in 2001 and 2003. En route to a 101-61 campaign, the team looked poised for another run to the Fall Classic, their only serious challenger in the AL being their arch-rival, the Boston Red Sox.

The breadth of the teams’ historic rivalry is too complex to detail here. For our purposes, we will note this: before 2004, it was akin to a bullied child whose tormenter didn’t even bother to take their lunch money: they simply waved all the money they already had in their face, then beat them with a food tray while the entire school pointed and laughed.

So, as the Yankees began the 2004 ALCS against the Sox, New York had mighty expectations: a seventh pennant and another evisceration of little bro Boston.

Alas, twas not to be.

After taking a 3-0 series lead (including a 19-8 massacre in Fenway Park), the Yankees seemed unstoppable, but the Red Sox fought back. Thanks to heroics by David Ortiz, an injured Curt Schilling, and a late breakout by the struggling Johnny Damon, they forced and won a Game 7, winning the pennant and eventually the World Series.

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The Yankees (and the world) were shocked. It was a tale of two distinct halves to an ultimately disappointing whole.

Still, the Yankees had 26 world championships to ease their sorrows, and time heals all wounds. After all, they returned to the World Series only five years later, beating the Philadelphia Phillies for their 27th title. So, the question must be asked: when reflecting on 2004, does the fanbase toil over that meteoric rise and crippling fall in the championship series, or take heart in all the incredible moments of another triumph for the game’s most storied franchise, like that Bernie Williams Bronx bomb that clinched another division title?

In short, when an experience starts so right only to go so wrong, what should we make of it?

It’s hard not to disregard what renders it painful because looking at Godzilla Minus One is a Thanksgiving feast for the eyes. The beast’s design doesn’t reinvent the wheel, which is good, but it makes subtle variations that enliven the proceedings. Godzilla, still armed with its signature puny arms and razor-sharp spiked back, looks more menacing than ever. The movie constantly gives close-ups of his eyes, making him feel almost like a human foe: intelligent, cunning, and incredibly personal. It makes the sequences in which it inflicts its wrath all the more devastating.

The film’s best sequence - when Godzilla hunts the small boat upon which our heroes seek to help destroy it through the open sea - is genuinely thrilling. It engages us not because of cheap tricks or silly gimmicks but because it holds firm on the monster. Godzilla swims through the water, not fast enough to easily catch the fleeing boat but not slow enough to get abandoned quickly. Director Takashi Yamazaki splits his focus, squeezing predator and prey into nearly every frame. We always sense the heightened stakes and Godzilla’s body being so exposed, its massive eyes fixed on its target as the remainder of its titanic frame lurks beneath the surface, opens constant questions of precisely what it has in store for its victims. When the full breadth of his might rains upon a heavy cruiser, it releases masterfully built tension and proves a colorful display of outright devastation.

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The movie impressively carries that same artistic intelligence into Godzilla’s attack on Ginza, rendering incredible detail into every building destroyed or train car ripped apart as the monster terrorizes the Japanese people. As a decades-long metaphor for the United States’ atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla can still inspire feelings of terror and remembrance with a visionary director at the helm. Unfortunately, that mastery does not translate when the movie becomes something other than a shameless monster movie. Sadly, as a narrative devoted to justifying the inclusion of a redemption arc that distracts from the dazzling visuals soaking up the screen, it fails miserably.

Kōichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot in the Imperial Japanese Navy, lands his aircraft at a base on Odo Island. The lead mechanic, Tachibana, inspects the plane and realizes that Shikishima has faked the mechanical issues and fled duty. Later that night, Godzilla attacks the island. When Tachibana implores Shikishima to run to his plane and fire the 20mm gun at the creature, he flees to the aircraft but cannot bring himself to shoot. Godzilla unleashes his wrath, killing all but Tachibana and Shikishima.

So begins the ludicrous idea that Shikishima is a coward who needs redemption, the thematic anchor of a movie that didn’t need one in the first place.

Let us examine this notion: a man whose job it is to commit suicide doesn’t want to commit suicide, so he’s a coward. A few hours later, he again doesn’t want to commit suicide by firing a gun he has no reason to believe will work on a massive sea monster to strangers, one of whom is urging him to make a sacrifice he probably wouldn't make himself.

Yeah, okay.

It’s bad enough that lead actor Ryunosuke Kamiki is bereft of talent, rendering Shikishima a dead-on-arrival protagonist if tasked with anything other than going to war with Godzilla, but the entire idea that this man is in any way cowardly takes up so much screentime while making zero sense whatsoever that it leaves us constantly longing for the incredible visual displays.

Godzilla Minus One forgets that not every movie needs to have a message, and some movies are best without one. Any movie featuring cinema’s most famous monster needs only one thing: cinema’s most famous monster. Tacking on a character arc to a monster movie is the equivalent of throwing a jar of cumin on a cake. You have a perfectly good dessert, can’t leave well enough alone, go, “Here, let’s try THIS,” and don’t even dump something on it that could pass for a good troll. It’s just a spice… on a cake… that you can’t eat.

Sure, we can still consume Minus One’s kick-ass special effects and love that Hollywood, though film’s Mecca, is not necessarily the go-to for special effects with genuine visual substance. Still, when half your movie gets bogged down by the “redemption” arc of some nitwit no one cares about, you’re worse off for it.

Even in the end, when the movie crescendos with Shikishima’s insistence that he sacrifice his life to save the country, redeeming his inaction as the cowardly pilot crippled by fear in the face of danger, it falls apart. In a cheap twist, Tachibana, having patched up his “relationship” with Shikishima and the decommissioned plane he will use to fly the explosives into Godzilla’s mouth (a very on-the-nose redemption mission), installs an ejector seat, which Shikishima uses to escape.

So, the guy whose supposed chance at redemption is embracing certain death to serve the greater good never actually makes that choice because he knows the entire time he’ll live? Simply being willing to fly doesn’t count or absolve him by the movie’s rules. The premise hinges on his fight or flight response being disastrously geared toward “flight” in the face of danger. That response goes untested because he knows he can escape; the idea thus collapses.

Under what, you ask?

Well, what seems to be an attempt at creating the magic of Top Gun: Maverick, where everyone gets to live, come home safe, and get their happy ending. Unfortunately, where that movie took a sledgehammer to the nostalgia bone and earned its heartwarming sap, this movie did not.

So, we get left with the same feeling of those 2004 Yankees. It was a dazzling start, and along the way, we got left with numerous impressions, many of them good. Godzilla Minus One is beautiful, finely edited, full of color, destruction, and genius character design.

But, when it mattered most, it leaned into the wrong things, was taken advantage of by false notions of superiority, and imploded, becoming an overall good experience that leaves a disappointing taste in the mouth.

Is it worth watching? Yes. Is it worth revisiting? Absolutely. Will it always entertain, regardless of what flaws you discover each time you rewatch? Definitely.

Alas, we must judge movies on all their choices, so Godzilla Minus One is only a good monster movie that could’ve been so much more.