In the Flesh: Godzilla Minus One

A scarred and warty knot of muscle and irradiated tissue, jaws venting nuclear horror so virulent it boils and burns the creature’s own flesh; director Takashi Yamazaki’s incarnation of the iconic monster is a living avatar of war in the nuclear age, metastatic and relentless. Just as the second World War won’t leave the body or mind of disgraced kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), neither will any amount of violence quell Godzilla’s unreasoning rage. The war, as Shikishima says when asked why he doesn’t marry his lovesick roommate and co-parent Noriko (Minami Hamabe), isn’t over. Life can’t exist in the void of indefinitely prolonged violence, a state so all-encompassing that Shikishima twice hallucinates during panic attacks that in fact he’s been dead for years, killed during his first encounter with the then-unmutated Godzilla and left to rot on a remote stretch of shoreline. Whenever happiness threatens, he retreats into self-flagellating memories of his failure to perform his duty as a suicide pilot, his failure to die along with the garrison Godzilla attacked.

At several points Yamazaki’s film asks us to reckon with our own interest in spectacles of war as entertainment. In one blackly comedic little vignette we watch as a radio crew in turn observes the destruction caused by the advancing monster, their broadcast increasingly frantic and sensational, until Godzilla’s tail undermines the rooftop on which they stand. Our perspective first begins to lean, then pitches toward the street as the crew fall to their deaths in a vertigo-inducing rush of screams and flapping clothes. Spectacle becomes reality. The human cost of this transfiguration’s reverse, the manufacture of entertainment from suffering, splatters on the sidewalk as our stomachs flip with the sudden rush of inverted gravity. “Perhaps our country has spent lives too cheaply,” says destroyer captain Tatsuo Hotta (Mio Tanaka) as he marshals a civilian effort to defeat Godzilla. “Tanks with thin armor, fighter planes without ejector seats.” The room full of naval veterans murmur their agreement. The specter of Imperial Japan’s disregard for the lives of its soldiers and citizens hangs over much of the film, a dust cloud as haunting as that of the monster’s nightmarishly evocative atomic breath.

“Not having been to war is something to be proud of,” says Yōji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), captain of the minesweeper on which Shikishima serves after the war, to youngster Shirō (Yuki Yamada). Again and again the film’s characters fight to imagine, and to remind one another, that a future exists, that the world is still turning. Even a slightly sappy ending can’t deflate the power of that message’s forceful articulation in the face of American and local indifference and the annihilating guilt and shame of the war’s survivors. Godzilla Minus One, from its melancholic and quietly charming first act to its wire-taut final action sequence, is a movie about throwing off the idea that people exist to wage war for and serve their governments. It posits instead that community — as in the lovable cast pulling together to raise the orphaned Akiko (Sae Nagatani) — is war’s polar opposite, an existence of all for all instead of many for few. Its willingness to plumb the dark means the movie’s few brave spots of light are richly deserved.