Review of Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus One,” 2023
And Other Assorted Godzilla Thoughts
I came across a meme once which said, “knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein wasn’t the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein was the monster.”
Likewise, knowledge is knowing that Godzilla is not about a monster. Wisdom is knowing that Godzilla is about a monster.
Godzilla Minus One is the first Godzilla film produced by Toho that I’ve had the privilege of seeing in theaters. This review presumes that you have seen the movie or at least do not care about spoilers.
As I read it, the title refers to the main character Koichi Shikishima’s failure to die honorably. The film opens with him landing on a military island from a failed kamikaze mission at the end of World War II. Though he says his plane was faulty, it is really because he chickened out. He is burdened with the knowledge that he should have died with his comrades. That night, Godzilla attacks the island, again killing everyone except for him and one other. The war ends, and he returns to Tokyo to find that his entire family died in the fire bombings.
He continually finds that everyone around him dies, except for him. His failure to die is a source of tremendous shame for him. He is unable to live with himself because he should not live at all. The failure of is to meet ought is made flesh in the coward Koichi. He is the constant exception, everyone died who should have, “minus one” person.
But he learns that he isn’t the only one, and the movie is full of characters who survived the war with varying wounds, some physical, all emotional. Everyone has survivor’s guilt for continuing to live in the face of all that was lost in the war. And the movie’s optimistic thrust is that life is worth more than honor.
So where does the giant monster come into this? Godzilla originally represented the destruction of nuclear weaponry. Minus One shows Godzilla’s heat ray annihilating a city in a catastrophic explosion complete with shock waves, heatwaves, radiation, black rain, and a mushroom cloud.
But in Minus One Godzilla embodies the darkness that follows all the characters. He is the monster that can be temporarily defeated but not killed. It includes Japan’s collective trauma at the nuclear atrocities against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the individual traumas of all the characters.
In Minus One he is an ancient creature, and the name “Godzilla” comes from folklore. He does not originate from nuclear testing, though his exposure to American bombings at Bikini Atoll increases his power. Godzilla here is an entirely natural creature, unlike the abomination of Shin Godzilla. He is also a living deity: nearly invulnerable and possessed of unfathomable motives, Godzilla wields vast destructive power, and emerges from both the distant past and seemingly from nature itself. He stands out as distinctly non-natural, although, again, he is in the context of the movie framed as a creature known to ancient cultures (and nothing in the film suggests he is of alien or supernatural origin).
Efforts to destroy him via modern technology –here represented by the nuclear bomb– merely enhance his power. When Godzilla attacks Odo Island early in the film he is relatively small. Between that attack and the later attack on Ginza (a highlight of the film) Godzilla was bombed by the U.S. Thus by the time of the Ginza attack, Godzilla has grown to sky scraper height and wields the atomic breath.
So he represents the chaos and destruction of old, augmented by modern technology as a result of its efforts to destroy it. The ultimate modern weapon is pit against the ancient Earth god, and the result is simply the magnification of the latter.
Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion. That has been the trajectory of European civilization (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947).
A key word here is “European.” Toho is a Japanese company, Godzilla is a Japanese character, and the director and the entire creative and production team was Japanese. It is unlikely that any of the analysis I’ve offered above was intentional on the part of the film makers, especially given the amount of human drama present in the film (which is done brilliantly, by the way).
However, Godzilla Minus One has seen tremendous success in the United States, far more than might be expected from a foreign film. The United States of America is a scion of Europe. I wonder if some of these themes might be present in American movie-goers, and though we might not notice the them outright, they resonate with us.
Maybe I’m giving the film too much credit. It does reference a lot of American popular culture in its visuals. The image above, for instance, of Godzilla swimming after a boat is an obvious reference to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Spielberg was also inspired by Godzilla films as a child.
I also think the movie’s optimistic streak and its narrative structure play a role in its success. We live in a time of cynicism and critique, and the formulae for optimism offered by our home-grown media long ago wore thin. Maybe I am so accustomed to Hollywood cliché that any competent deviation from it feels like high art at this point. But the optimism of the Godzilla Minus One feels authentic. I recall a line from one character, which I quote from memory: “this country has neglected the importance of life for too long.” He is talking about Japan, but a line like that, delivered in the way it is (and in a foreign language with subtitles!), must hit home for many Americans.
The narrative structure is both a straightforward coming-of-age story and a subversion of it. Recall that the central emotional conflict of the protagonist Koichi is that he ought not to be alive, but he is. The distinction between is and ought, and the personal shame derived from his failure to make the two meet, is what brings Koichi to a dreadful consciousness. The film begins with a shot of his bomb-armed plane reaching the air strip at Odo Island. The character literally becomes conscious (i.e. enters the film) after his decision to deviate from the designated course. A pre-conscious judgment (perhaps even pre-existential judgment) was made in favor of life against the conformism of honor-bound death. As Camus writes in the introduction to The Rebel, “I rebel, therefore we exist.”
In a coming-of-age story, the protagonist strives to achieve maturity, which for Koichi means confronting the death he chickened out from as a kamikaze. This brings us back to the emotional struggle outlined above: that Koichi’s “internal war” (a term he uses in the movie) asks how to fulfill your destiny when your destiny is to die unfulfilled.
The arc of the story bends toward Koichi’s death coinciding with the defeat of Godzilla. That would be the standard resolution for this story. Once is and ought are resolved, Koichi, who came to be as a result of a deviation of the two, would have to cease to exist. At first that appears to be the case as Koichi flies into the maw of the beast with explosives strapped to his plane. But the movie subverts that expectation by showing Koichi survive thanks to a specially designed pilot ejection seat, and he is recovered and able to return to a normal life. Godzilla is defeated as Koichi’s plane explodes in his mouth, blowing his head off, and his body disintegrates into the ocean.
Standard coming-of-age stories involve the protagonist (individual) reconciling themselves to the society. But here the characters (collective), create more humane social expectations for the protagonists. Koichi’s survival is another act of rebellion, creating a space between is and ought.
The Ancient Greek story of the Oresteia mirrors some of these themes. There, the Mycenean prince Orestes is caught between moral obligations to avenge his father by killing his murderer, and to respect his mother, Clytemnestra. His mother is his father’s murderer, however. In such circumstances, right living is impossible. Like Godzilla Minus One, Orestes’ story ends with amended social obligations. In the Oresteia, the clan-and-blood based morality is replaced with trial by jury of one’s peers, presided over by the goddess Athena. In Godzilla Minus One, the honor based morality is replaced by a humanist morality, spoken into being at the end by the same character who speaks of valuing life.
Blood and clan replaced by trial by jury, and honor replaced by humanism.
The overarching theme is progress. In the Greek play, it is still cast in aristocratic terms: Orestes is a prince, and his father was Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae and Commander-in-Chief of the Greeks in the Trojan War. He is tried, not by his peers among Mycenean royalty, but by Athenian citizenry with no royal status. But in Godzilla Minus One, it is the ordinary people who take up the mantle of the new society. The scene which explains the final plan to defeat Godzilla also emphasizes that it is all done at the initiative of private citizens who refused to wear uniforms or to take orders from former military commanders. These people are not Greek heroes. They demonstrate the heroism that may be found in almost everyone.
There is yet a darker side to it. Although progress emerges victorious at the end of Godzilla Minus One, recall that the monster grows in the face of modern efforts to defeat him. This does not mean progress is not worth it. But we must always ask what we are progressing toward, and by what means.
