When it comes to bringing Godzilla to thrilling, terrifying life, America’s track record has been spotty at best, marked by a few minor highs (2014’s Godzilla, 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong) and lots of lows (virtually everything else, including Apple TV+’s current Monarch: Legacy of Monsters). Not so, however, in his homeland. As Toho Studios’ new Godzilla Minus One proves, the Japanese know how to get the iconic radioactive behemoth right.
The 37th feature in the 70-year-old franchise, and arguably one of its finest, Godzilla Minus One, which hits theaters Dec. 1, harkens back to the kaiju’s 1954 origins, yet is far from merely a nostalgia play. On the contrary, Takashi Yamazaki’s film is a faithful update that, like its 2016 predecessor Shin Godzilla, melds then and now with blockbuster-grade brawniness. Skillfully balancing its human- and titan-sized concerns, and going light on socio-political allegory in favor of muscular mayhem, it delivers just about everything fans could want from a sequel—including plentiful larger-than-life chaos and madness.
Writer/director Yamazaki wastes not a second getting to the good stuff, as no sooner has WWII kamikaze fighter pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) landed on Odo island in 1945 to have his faulty craft repaired than he and the rest of the island’s military inhabitants are beset by Godzilla, who’s at this early stage less a skyscraper-tall monster than an overgrown dinosaur. If his stature is relatively small, though, his ferocious temper is already mature, and he viciously decimates everyone and everything in his path. In the morning, the sole survivors of this massacre are mechanic Sosaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) and Koichi, and the former largely blames the latter for these casualties due to the fact that the pilot had Godzilla in his plane’s gun sights but, at the moment of truth, froze.
