Just the Ticket #190: Godzilla Minus One

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.

Last month, I watched a cheap, culturally insensitive movie about white women in Africa incurring the wrath of an aquatic lizard monster with a backwards machete, and began to seriously reconsider my life choices.

So just when I was starting to think movies couldn't get any dumber, I traded in my rusty Panga for a nice, thicc Gojira,

Specifically (again, see the thumbnail and title if you haven't figured it out yet), I'm talking about Gojira -1.0, or Godzilla Minus One. And yes, I know that the character trailers for the Hulk vs Godzilla Death Battle are out by now. This review's timing is just a coincidence.

I was familiar with the numbered subtitle convention from anime such as the Jujutsu Kaisen 0 prequel movie, video games like Street Fighter Alpha (Street Fighter Zero in Japan), and manga such as Jaco: the Galactic Patrolman (which counted up/down to Dragon Ball Minus in its later chapters), but I didn't understand the meaning behind these choices beyond simple integer counting. What distinguishes a Minus from a Minus One? Why is there a Godzilla Minus One if there was no Godzilla Zero?

It seems that in Japanese media, the Minus is often used to denote a negative state of being rather than just "the prequel before the prequel;" a time of beginning that is also tragic or dire. So the Minus encompasses Zero, but with even farther to rise.

Released in celebration of the 70th anniversary of Godzilla (the "whale-gorilla"'s first appearance was 1954's Gojira—dubbed and Power Ranger'd with scenes of Raymond Burr in 1956 as Godzilla, King Of the Monsters!—which, you may recall from my Last Man Standing review, I watched when I made a feeble attempt at viewing the entire franchise a few years back), Godzilla Minus One is an almost perfect monster movie that perfectly captures the implications of its title.

In the final days of World War II, kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki, Howl's Moving Castle & Spirited Away) fakes a mechanical failure out of cowardice and lands on the island of Odo for "repairs," where all but he and the chief mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki, the live action Rurouni Kenshin films) are killed by Godzilla (who seems to have attended the Elle Woods "Bend & Snap" school of homicidal eating in between undersea naps—one of which was interrupted by the same Bikini Atoll detonation that created Spongebob—and attacks based on the Predator code).

This latter isn't ever stated in the film, but Godzilla's inception as a physical allegory for Japanese nuclear PTSD and his inconsistent but observable behavior toward non-threats like Shikishima, as well as threats like the Japanese navy and the forces stationed on Odo, speak to this conclusion. Godzilla is even blatantly juxtaposed against Shikishima later in the film, contrasting the monster as a force of violent anti-war demonstration roaring in triumph at the lives he has silenced, with Shikishima as a man still fighting a war in his soul who roars in anguish at the carnage he has survived through inaction.

Returning home to a city in ruin as a living disgrace (because war makes sense), Shikishima builds a found family with the beautiful (and very possibly a baby thief) Noriko (Minami Hamabe, The Promised Neverland), the aforementioned kidnapped/rescued baby Akiko, and his nosy neighbor Sumiko (Sakura Ando). As time passes, he gets a job salvaging and destroying sea mines with a very Jaws-inspired crew of misfits who become his friends and part of the found family: the captain (Kuranosuke Sasaki, the 20th Century Boys trilogy), "Kid" the plucky civilian (Yuki Yamada, Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger), and "Doc" Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka, Always: Sunset On Third Street). They encounter Godzilla at sea while guarding a battleship he attacked, and seemingly defeat him with the ending of Jaws until they see he can regenerate. Keep this in mind for later.

With time ticking down before Godzilla makes landfall in Tokyo and the government continuing to stay silent about the giant, mushroom cloud-breathing, weapon-proof, regenerating monster that just crushed, demolished, and nuked a city, it's up to Noda, his cobbled-together team of fluid dynamics pseudoscientists, and Shikishima in an experimental aircraft repaired by Tachibana (whom he was only able to enlist the help of by promising to commit suicide and spamming him with fake hate mail), to concoct a scientifically unproven, intricately unsound plan to kill Godzilla with...an extreme case of the bends?

Yeah, the idea is to rapidly sink Godzilla to the bottom of Sagami Bay with freon tanks where the pressure and freezing temperatures are supposed to perpetually negate his healing factor (which fails, so they attempt to rapidly bring him back to the surface with giant pool floaties to induce barotrauma, which fails because Godzilla is smart, so they have to drag him to the surface with national pride and the power of friendship—multiple, literal friend-ships, actually—where Shikishima completes his character arc by...flying into Godzilla's mouth with a plane full of explosives, which...works‽).

Okay, time to shut off my critical brain because Godzilla Minus One is meant to be a philosophical, emotional, statement-making film, not a logical sense-making film. Ignore the manufactured tension and the Japanese media trope where the attack everyone knows didn't work on the regenerating villain before suddenly works in the climax because the hero has completed his arc and everyone helped this time (see the end of Dragon Ball's Cell, Buu, Goku Black, Shadow Dragons, and Daima arcs, as well as the latest Made In Abyss and My Hero Academia movies). Beyond its tropes and flaws (including the biggest "how did they survive that‽" bullshit moment since War Of the Worlds), Minus One is about Shikishima rising above the war and the "dishonor" that defined and traumatized him. It's about family, and togetherness in general. It's about how the timing of information, as decided by those in power, can shape the fate of a country and drive its citizens to act in their own best interests, for better or worse.

In the real world, it's about how the quality of something isn't entirely dependent on how much it costs to create, but on the passion behind the process of creation. Godzilla doesn't always look like he's physically present (I don't think compositing will ever be a perfect technology), but he looks amazing and spectacular and threatening every time he appears. The classic roar and theme music are used well. And in the absence of Godzilla, the human characters are written and acted like real, sympathetic people who have gone through the worst real and fictional disasters possible, so that even as their scientifically unsound, luck-based plan to kill a nigh-immortal kaiju encounters setbacks, they feel worth rooting for. "Kid" showing up with the tugboats was an Avengers Endgame, "Assemble!"-level moment that made me cheer. And even as I knew that Godzilla would survive, I shared in Shikishima's triumph at delivering the finishing blow.

Sequels to both Minus One and 2016's Shin Godzilla are in the works, and I am excited to see where this new era of Godzilla will go next.

A-1.0

Doubling up on anime this week (Ossan Newbie Adventurer and Guild Receptionist) didn't help my traffic or my ability to keep track of what day it was, so I'll be slowing things down a little for Samurai Week of Anime August. Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can avoid the Minus moments in life, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content.

Ticketmaster,
0ut.