MOVIE REVIEW: Godzilla Minus One Minus Color

The following is a repost of my review of Gozilla Minus One Minus Color (2023), originally shared here on Letterboxd.

The Triumph of the Genre Film

Self-serious literary circles tend to hold “genre pieces” at arm’s length. This is a ridiculous premise because every story has a genre. But not all genres are created equal, at least in the eyes of critics. To play devil’s advocate, the genres that often get lumped under the derogatory umbrella of “genre fiction” or “genre films” are overpopulated with stories where the things that made the publishing houses and movie studios see dollar signs were the exciting trappings of those genres rather than the stories themselves. In short, the genres that critics are sub-tweeting when they decry “genre fare”–horror, sci-fi, fantasy, superhero, you name it–have been given a bad name because of shoddy get-rich-quick schemes that took genres whose lineage begins with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and processed them into the likes of Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus. What left me spellbound for the entire duration of Godzilla Minus One Minus Color was the sense that a perfect genre specimen was unfolding before my very eyes. From the first frame, I knew I was watching something that would reignite the conversation around genre films. And by the final frame, I knew that we had just been gifted the latest in a line of masterworks that make the case for the awesome power that genre fare has the possibility to offer, when done right.

The kaiju movie has been dealt perhaps the worst hand of all in the line-up of poor genres that have been chewed up and spat back out by Hollywood’s worst money-making impulses. Ishirō Honda’s 1954 original is the genre’s filmic Frankenstein–its Old Testament and esteemed progenitor–but since then the kaiju film has gone from an expression of a society’s collective terror over forces larger than humanity can possibly understand or control to a sure-fire way for the likes of the Asylum to win air-time on the Syfy Network with the help of the cheapest CGI mega-three-headed-shark-tornado-hybrid gagoos imaginable. Godzilla Minus One Minus Color redeems that lineage. At the very least, it shows the path forward, and it does that by turning inward. Now let’s talk about how it does this.

The first answer–perhaps the most obvious but still absolutely essential–is unflinching creative commitment. That’s the engine inside the production (we’ll talk about the engine behind the story in a moment). The world now knows about the thirty-five-man team that made this film’s visual effects a reality. Even with all the complexities of storytelling and filmmaking, the VFX could have sunk this movie if left undercooked. This heroic team of thirty-five represents the efforts of each department that worked on this film because their engine was craftsmanship, was telling a powerful story. Not “get it done now and cheap.” Crucially, however–and this will bring us up to the engine that was running the story–they were given the opportunity to sacrifice ungodly silver-screen breadth in favor of a higher quality depth. This modest team was able to deliver a quality product without turning to a two-hundred-man burnt-out content farm because Godzilla Minus One was not designed as a visually-impossible production. Rather than fabricate an entire film inside a hard drive Quantumania-style (complete with digital environments, digital characters, and digital costume elements even on the live-action characters), this production cut out the fat. This film was able to perform its various miracles because, true to its title, the monster is kept to a minimum. The heart of this film, through and through, from start to finish, is startlingly human.

I need to pause here. I’m worried that this might come across as ashamed of the things that make this film “genre” in the first place. I understand that it may seem hypocritical to bemoan the critical panning of genre stories while championing a film whose achievements stem from a focus on intimate human drama. But this film is not at all ashamed of its monster. It wears it like a badge of honor, aspiring to the mantle offered by its progenitor rather than the many predecessors in between. The production clearly loves and delights in its source material, offering thrilling perils soundtracked by an excellent and earnest re-orchestration of the original 1954 theme music. But the tone switches on a dime when the buildings start to come down. As the destruction of Ginza reaches its peak, the cue from the soundtrack is titled “Divine,” and the music is suitably awe-struck and elegiac. And while the movie clearly has its fun with its kaiju superstar, it always remembers what he represents, and the filmmakers know when to turn the camera from the destruction to the man surviving it.

That story engine is here. Godzilla Minus One manages to successfully be about a lot of things, not the least of which is the terror of a post-nuclear world; the iconic kaiju only grows stronger and more terrifying the more you escalate your weapons against it. But chief among the things this film is about is survivor’s guilt. From the very first shot–the camera mounted on the underside of a kamikaze plane which is being piloted toward a landing strip to get repairs it doesn’t need–this film explores the haunted corners of its hero’s survivor’s guilt in searing, expressionistic, cinematic depth. It just so happens that, apart from the war he defects in the first sequence, the thing he is surviving is Gozilla. The story is human, even if the plot is kaiju.

And so, at the absolute climax of Godzilla’s land attack on Ginza, the film cuts from the post-Potsdam wreckage rendered by its titular icon to focus instead on Shikishima’s reaction. The city is collapsing from Godzilla’s atomic breath, but that is just the backdrop. What is truly gut-wrenching is the realization that Shikishima has just ratcheted his personal battle with guilt and grief round the spiral one level deeper. In one of 2023’s most indelible cinematic images, Shikishima falls to his knees in a scream of horrified realization that puts Munch’s to shame. Debris rains around him and ash rains on his face, but in black in white, it very well might be blood. It is perhaps the most resounding moment of anguish in cinema last year, and yes, it’s part of a Gozilla movie. The film is entirely dialed into Shikishima’s hero’s journey, to the point that more screen time is devoted to his living room panic attacks than to the monster causing them. And it makes for one of the most harrowing, poignant, stirring character arcs I’ve seen on screen in a long time–let along in a genre production.

Which brings us back around to where we began. Godzilla Minus One Minus Color achieved with thirty-five VFX artists, two hours, and grayscale what many studios in today’s film climate CLAIM they are doing: rooting genre cinema in intimate, personal character journeys. As far as I’m concerned, this is the new gold standard for that claim. It encodes its sci-fi monster so much more deeply than the lip-service we see today’s superhero films pay to ideas like theme and symbol. With expressionistic, impassioned acting, a ferocious score that takes no prisoners, striking cinematography, and the full commitment of all involved, Godzilla Minus One Minus Color reminds us of the spectacular stories our most beloved genres are capable of. Not because it pushes its monsters and fighter planes and Freon tanks to the margins, but because it uses those imaginative elements to frame the relatable, human experience at its center, giving us a way into understanding forces beyond the powers of human comprehension.