Dispatches from Tokyo International Film Festival 2023: Godzilla Minus One (Closing Film)

 

In the final days of the Second World War, Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) lands on a remote island in Japan. As the crew tends to his plane, the lead mechanic (Munetaka Aoki) figures out that he's a failed Kamikaze pilot. Before they manage to resolve that, however, the resident god of the island attacks - and he's a god that many of us are familiar with, because this is Odo Island, and the god visiting the island is none other than Godzilla...

Intended as a remake of the 1954 original film, Godzilla Minus One recontextualizes its titular monster and shifts the story to an even earlier period in postwar Japan. Most of the first half of the film centers on Shikishima (having barely escaped Odo Island with his life) discovering the effects of the war on his country and on his family - or rather what's left of it, as most of them are killed during the war's last days. Shikishima tries to live a new life with his trauma and discovers something of a found family - fellow survivor Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe) and another survivor, a young orphan whose parents were killed in an allied bombing. After years of PTSD and survivor's guilt, he begins to feel a sense of normalcy, that is, until Godzilla returns.

In the original 1954 film, there were very obvious parallels to the titular monster and the beginning of the atomic age - Godzilla was as much a victim as the people he terrorized, a hibakusha in every sense of the word. The device used to defeat him was also a weapon of mass destruction, perhaps an even more fearsome one than the bombs that mutated and deformed the original monster, and much of the original film is about the scientist who created that weapon grappling with the monstrosity of his creation.

However, in this reimagining, Godzilla becomes more a metaphor for the specter of war itself, of the deep psychological and emotional wounds suffered by everyone involved in war. Noriko repeatedly asks Shikishima if he's finished fighting his war, and she refers not to his battle against Godzilla, but his own internal battle, the battle to prove to himself that he deserves to live. In this film, many of the survivors of the war dealt with their own pain in different ways - perhaps because they fought in something they didn't believe in, or because they felt that the government didn't care for them enough, or simply because that they lost. (Not necessarily reckoning the things that they did in that war, that process is still going on today.) The (very different) plan to defeat Godzilla serves not as a metaphor for weapons of mass destruction; it now becomes a metaphor for the wasted talents and expertise of people who were co-opted in the service of an imperialist war machine.

Indeed, the Japanese government is all but absent in the film, having exhausted their limited resources in the initial defense of Tokyo. The Americans are all but absent as well, though their atomic tests still catalyze Godzilla's transformation, their carelessness the source of most of the film's problems. What emerges is something contrary to the themes of this film's direct predecessor, Hideaki Anno's Shin Godzilla (2016): in that film a functioning bureaucracy, and not necessarily the absence of one, is the key to a nation's success. In this one, sans bureaucracy of any kind (mostly), it is a nation's people that will ultimately uplift it. Cognizant of the wastefulness and meaninglessness of war, the group that eventually faces off against Godzilla do so in order to use their talents for something positive for a change, something truly worth fighting for.

Even when things slide into melodrama, the film manages to create some amazing setpieces that I will not spoil here. Yamazaki has toyed with the idea of Godzilla before, creating a dream sequence featuring the titular monster, a prototype perhaps, in the second part of his Always: Sunset on Third Street series. In recent years there's been a sort of emotional distance in the destruction Godzilla wreaks upon Tokyo - but here that destruction is personal and deeply felt.

It's quite a refreshing take on the venerable monster and his 70 year legacy, and it's one that I highly recommend.