Godzilla Minus One
(PG-13) ★★★☆ In war-torn Japan, a new crisis emerges.
The other Japanese movie currently showing in more than 2,000 U.S. theaters “features some of the best blockbuster filmmaking in years,” said Lucas Trevor in The Washington Post. Whereas Hollywood’s Godzilla sequels lean into spectacle at the expense of emotional stakes, this “genuinely terrifying” remake of the original 1954 monster movie combines suspenseful action with characters we can connect to emotionally. “The result is an entertaining epic in every sense of the word.” The story centers on two Japanese war survivors, including a former kamikaze pilot, who are raising an orphaned child and becoming a couple in the aftermath of World War II when a giant lizard emerges from the ocean and attacks a still-recovering Tokyo. “The real conflict is within,” said Richard Whittaker in the Austin Chronicle.
Ryūnosuke Kamiki plays the ex-pilot, who feels survivor’s guilt for having abandoned a suicide mission and who now must decide whether to die in a confrontation with Godzilla or live on for the sake of his new proxy family. Godzilla has always been a metaphor for the horror of nuclear weapons, and this war veteran’s conflicted feelings about honor, sacrifice, and redemption turn Godzilla Minus One into “an attempt to understand Japanese martial and imperial culture.” Fortunately, “the monstrous carnage doesn’t crush the human drama but only adds to it.” When Godzilla lays waste to Tokyo,
“it’s chilling and shocking to witness,” said Mark Hughes in Forbes. “Importantly, none of this is intended to thrill us. It’s meant to terrify, to disgust, to bring us to tears. And it does. See this film in IMAX or Dolby Cinema, if at all possible.”