I went to IMAX Melbourne to see what for me turned out to be the most surprising movie of the year.
Full disclosure: I haven’t seen any of the countless Godzilla movies, Japanese or American, and monster genre has never been my thing, so I never imagined I’d be interested in this new Japanese reboot celebrating the 70th anniversary of the original Godzilla. The overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from my favourite YouTubers got me intrigued, and perhaps more significantly, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer from earlier this year brought back the grim reality of the atomic bomb, which inspired Japan’s most famous monster in the first place. I always found the original metaphor of Godzilla incredibly haunting; any American remake could never hope to replicate the same resonance.
Minus One puts the traumatic war history squarely in the centre, opening in the last days of World War II. Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a young pilot on a kamikaze mission who understandably loses his nerve and instead lands his plane on Odo island, citing a non-existent engine problem. At night, the island is attacked by a giant sea creature; at this point, Godzilla is merely the size of a T-Rex, but he’s still bloody terrifying. Once again, Shikishima is paralysed with fear when he has a chance to kill the monster, and ends up a lone survivor of the rampage.
Wracked with survivor’s guilt, Shikishima returns to Tokyo to finds his parents dead and his house a pile of rubble after the Allied firebombing. Through chance and circumstance, he builds something of a family with Noriko (Minami Hamabe), a young woman who also lost everything in the war, and Akiko, an orphaned baby rescued by Noriko. Just when it looks like things are on the upswing for the tentative family and the nation of Japan, Godzilla, now mutated to his iconic gargantuan proportions after the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, returns to wreak havoc on humans once again.
There apparently have been more sympathetic and humanised versions of Godzilla, but this raging creature of an almost incomprehensible scale, with fearsome atomic breath that can flatten an entire suburb, is no cuddly misunderstood monster. The budget for this movie is reportedly peanuts compared to your average Hollywood spectacle, but somehow they managed to squeeze the most out of every single dollar to create one of the best-looking disaster films I’ve seen. Though reading subtitles at the IMAX felt a tad weird, it’s definitely a movie to watch on a big screen, where intense action, eye-popping visuals and incredible sound design (including some very effective use of silence) are at their most glorious.
Even more impressively, along with action, destruction and spectacle Minus One succeeds where many disaster movies fail miserably, and actually offers a compelling human story as the citizens of Tokyo, still shell-shocked by the war and effectively abandoned by their own government, rally together to defeat the monster with teamwork and science. All too often with this sort of movie, you end up twiddling your thumbs while you wait for the tedious human drama to be over and for the tornado, volcano, comet or giant lizard to spice things up already, but here I found myself genuinely engaged and even moved by the humanist spirit of it all. One of the movie’s most endearing qualities is its sheer sincerity, and the earnest way it treats themes like guilt, heroism, sacrifice and love for your country (if not your government).
As minor criticisms, there were a few moments of over-acting that briefly pulled me out of the movie; there’s also a long middle stretch when the existential threat of Godzilla feels lessened simply because he remains off screen for a tad too long. Overall though this Japanese release made for a fraction of a Marvel movie cost puts most modern Hollywood blockbusters to shame.
P.S. I really want to cheer for the new Furiosa movie, but the trailer I saw at the IMAX was quite underwhelming, with way too much of the same familiar imagery and heavy reliance on the CGI. I loved Mad Max: Fury Road, I love Anya Taylor-Joy, I just don’t know if she can bring the same physicality and grit Charlize Theron had as Furiosa. Oh well here’s hoping.
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