Godzilla Minus One

The best movie of 2023

Minami Hamabe as Noriko Oishi

Some of the best movies I’ve ever seen were films I didn’t really feel strongly about seeing in the first place. I had never heard of Burning (2018) until my friend Rho recommended we go check it out. Riveting. Moonlight (2016) wasn’t on my radar until my friend Cam insisted it needed to be seen in a theater. Masterful. My Mom told me her favorite movie of all time was Midnight Cowboy (1969), so again I stumbled into an all-timer. 

And Godzilla Minus One (2023) was no different. David Kirlin, notoriously into bad movies (by his own admission), invited me to check it out in December. I love going to movies with David; he has an open heart for entertainment, and I thought this would be fun no matter the film. Once again, lightning struck at the behest of another: this movie is a masterwork. I went home in a daze, processing the unexpected weight of the film. It was thrilling to watch, like the best blockbusters, and it was thoughtful, like the best indie films. Was this what it might’ve been like to watch the original in theaters!?

From the start, the film asks a challenging moral question, specifically in the context of Japan’s cultural history: Is it wrong to live with defeat? A kamikaze pilot lands his plane at a remote repair station on Odo island, off the coast of Japan, claiming there are issues with the craft. The mechanics eye him warily, suspecting his true intentions for landing on Odo. They seem to know what’s going on. The events that follow will make the film's theme abundantly clear. Our young pilot is tested in the precise way that he was trying to avoid by visiting Odo island in the first place.

The brilliance of Godzilla Minus One is in how it centers the pilot, Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), in the story as he grapples with dereliction of duty and what it means to live. The power of the film comes from our genuine interest in the characters and their stories in what feels like a relatable universe: this is how good the dramatic action is: we forget we’re watching a Godzilla movie. When we see Shikishima thinking through work so that he can support the woman and the baby she found, we focus on the post-war struggle of these characters. When Godzilla resurfaces (in ways you might not expect: the filmmakers have cited Jaws (1975) as a visual inspiration for sequences in this film), you are genuinely shocked that something like this is happening in the “normal universe.”

I’m going to quote myself from my review on Letterboxd back when I first saw the film, but I’ll remove one word to prevent spoilers:

The movie's throughline indictment of XXXXXX is only one component of WWII, an introspective component for Japan, that the movie tackles. The US is not spared the implication of the horror that befalls Japan as the primary external factor [in Japan’s suffering]. This is what makes Godzilla Minus One great: it's ability to translate the complexity of the guilt of WWII into a thrilling genre film that pays homage to the history of the Godzilla films (that score!), while delicately expanding the films' underlying philosophy.

Godzilla Minus One caused a stir over the past several months, as it was almost impossible to stream online due to rights issues between distributors and studios. Essentially, this film has been impossible to watch for the past six months. Then Netflix tweeted the following:

Brilliant marketing for a movie that extremely online people have been dying to watch. If you haven’t heard of this movie, you should thank your lucky stars and go into it without reading anything else. If you’ve heard of it and think it sounds over-hyped, believe the hype. If you’re just a general loser on the internet that sees an opportunity to farm engagement when everyone likes something, so you’re inclined to dislike this: then boo to you, I say. Godzilla Minus One was the best film of 2023. Thank God I have friends who continue to drag me to movie theaters.

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Godzilla Minus One
Written and Directed by Takashi Yamazaki
2023
125 minutes
Japanese
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Netflix