Flasz On Film

2023 is the year of the franchise flopbuster – the year of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, John Wick: Chapter 4, and Fast X, all of them thoroughly underwhelming. It’s the year when Marvel and Disney showed they are running out of steam. It’s the year of DC in continued managed decline. It’s the year of the Barbenheimer – a summer event that showed for a brief second that two non-franchised movies (Barbie and Oppenheimer) could break records at the box office and send studio moguls into a tailspin, because how exactly are you supposed to franchise a biopic? And yet, a year as dire for studio-backed mass entertainment ends up salvaged not by an original story like The Creator, but by a new chapter in probably the longest-running franchise in the history of cinema, a franchise so long, its legacy is divided into eras.  

Enter Godzilla Minus One, the newest addition to the long-standing series of kaiju movies. Made on a comparatively shoestring budget of just about fifteen million dollars, this movie directed and written by Takashi Yamazaki (The Great War of Archimedes) effectively puts to shame the vast majority of Hollywood-derived blockbusters with the level of its spectacle and brings to mind the memories of when Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 came out of nowhere in 2009 and showed how far a team of talented filmmakers could stretch a limited budget. What is more, Godzilla Minus One – a de facto prequel to the 1954 classic, aptly titled as such because it comes exactly one year ahead of the 70^th anniversary of the release of Ishiro Honda’s seminal Godzilla – shows without much hesitation where Hollywood is going wrong, which is especially exacerbated if you happen to watch this film in a screening preceded by a trailer to the upcoming Godzilla x Kong, a new instalment of the Hollywood-produced incarnation of the Godzilla shared universe, which has since forgotten its own Spielbergian roots we witnessed in the Gareth Edwards-directed starter.  

What Yamazaki’s film has, and what most other franchise spectacles frequently forget about, is a heartbeat of a simple human drama that is relatable and believable enough to ground an otherwise outlandish experience dominated by the presence of a giant lizard coming out of the ocean, destroying cities and shooting nuclear lasers out of its mouth. Like the 1954 Ishiro Honda classic, Godzilla Minus One is first and foremost a film about people with a monster in it, not the other way around. And by sheer virtue of this simple decision, the narrative identity of Godzilla itself becomes refreshingly reframed as a symbol. Not of nature’s wrath at the hubris of scientists intending to play God and inventing weapons that are too powerful for anyone to be used. In Godzilla Minus One, the titular monster is a symbol of national guilt, which is then reflected in the main character of the film, Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who fled from battle in the last days of World War II and then came back, together with other survivors of the conflict, as a broken man riddled with guilt. He makes his way back to what used to be his family home only to find smouldering rubble, memories of hellfire and destruction and accusations of cowardice… as if his own honourable death on the battlefield at the behest of Imperial Japan, a country with historic view of human life as cheap and disposable.  

Struggling to find a meaning in his life and trying to understand how to exist in a new post-war reality, Shikishima finds companionship in Noriko (Minami Hamabe), a young homeless woman, and Akiko (Sae Nagatani), a little orphaned girl. Ludicrous as it may sound, this entire movie could easily dispose with a giant monster wreaking havoc in the cities, and it would still work perfectly well as a piece of neo-realist drama of the kind Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu made after the war, as though to reflect similar sentiments as the masters of Italian neo-realism like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini.  

However, the introduction of the supernatural element – a massive fire-breathing radioactive lizard monster – is needed to make a Godzilla movie, which is what the filmmakers were after. Though, I suppose this is a good place to pause and pontificate for a little while longer the idea of nesting what essentially amounts to a modern incarnation of Japanese neo-realism found in films of Hirokazu Kore-eda in an otherwise completely outlandish set of circumstances. And that’s because this is where the main lesson for Hollywood filmmakers lies buried. What only a handful of currently working American directors seems to have a good enough grasp on is the fact that a blockbuster is rendered great when its drama can function with its spectacle completely pared down. This is what made Steven Spielberg movies stand out so profoundly from the crowd of other similar fare. War of the Worlds could work fine without Martians invading Earth and turning everyone into lyophilised mist.  

Such is the case with Godzilla Minus One which crafts a beautiful piece of subtle drama occasionally veering into Spielbergian sentimentalism and through the struggles of its central characters alone it makes a powerful enough commentary about the trauma of post-war reintegration of survivors, the guilt of coming back home after losing a war and knowing its cause to be corrupt, having to face new realities, and needing to deal with your own demons so as to take care of those even less fortunate. It’s all in here and what makes this movie stand out – again, Hollywood, pay attention – is that the spectacle amplifies the drama instead of overshadowing it. The giant radioactive monster isn’t here to draw your attention away from Shikishima and Noriko. It’s here to add further context to their strife and to elevate the narrative.  

Hence, Yamazaki’s movie is a stunningly riveting blockbuster fuelled by its well-rounded and beautifully written character work. Moreover, it is also understandably and unabashedly steeped in its own legacy, so as to keep the lineage tracing back to Ishiro Honda alive, but without having to tap into the well in the way most if not all Hollywood legacy sequels do nowadays. This isn’t a stealth remake or an attempt to re-heat the old classics, but a genuine piece of entertainment inspired by the 1954 film and its many sequels. From Godzilla’s visage and the purposeful attempt to make it look like a CG-generated man-in-a-suit to various elements of lore, occasional self-awareness and even a few choice references to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, Godzilla Minus One is a blockbuster we needed this year – epic in scale, but still incredibly focused, deliberate, assured and dramatically accomplished.  

And it all cost less than Tom Cruise’s contracted fee for starring in the newest Mission: Impossible movie.  

It only goes to show that not necessarily less is more, but that you can accomplish just as much as the big spender in the room without having anywhere near as much money to throw out the window. All you need is a combination of dedication, great ideas and an understanding of what makes great movies great. If movies were companies, Godzilla Minus One is a valiant startup full of vigour and innovation. Nimble, agile and able to generate loads of explosive power without much elbow room, a small player like this can easily outshine a large and well-funded juggernaut weighed down by its procedures, established institutional habits and a calcified culture.  

Here’s hoping that when the time comes – and it will – folks responsible for the well-deserved success of Godzilla Minus One will know what to do when their next effort attracts considerable financial support. If they play their cards right, and I hope Yamazaki comes back to write and direct it, Toho Studios stands a great chance not only to bring Godzilla back into the global forefront of entertainment, but perhaps to unseat Hollywood from its longstanding supremacy as the primary purveyor of blockbuster thrills.