A Big Minus

It seems we've entered a new period of World War II being mythologised. Yesterday I went to see 2023's Godzilla Minus One, a movie that pays homage to the original Godzilla (1954) while adding a new gloss of sentimentality and nationalism. I'm not particularly a fan of Godzilla or of kaiju movies in general, but I do like the original 1954 film. This 2023 movie does offer some interesting food for thought from writer/director Yamazaki Takashi via some editorial manipulation.

I might not be the right audience for this film. Something about kaiju movies doesn't register with me on a fundamental level. I don't mean monster movies; I love a lot of monster movies. I mean specifically the kaiju movie of Japan that took shape in the decades following the first Godzilla in which certain plot mechanics and formulae became entrenched. There are aspects of this movie that I consider flaws but which are common to kaiju films so I think they're considered positive, even essential, qualities by fans of the genre.

One thing that really bothers me is a sense of clear division between "monster attack" reality and "reacting to monster attack" reality. Godzilla Minus One begins with kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) abandoning his mission and landing at a small island base. Suddenly, Godzilla, at this point only about the size of a three storey building, attacks. He's fast and brutal, tearing through men, picking some up and throwing them. Then there are reaction shots of Shikishima and others, standing there stunned, watching and commenting like they're seeing it on TV. There are moments like this throughout the film in which Godzilla is presumably patiently waiting just off-screen for characters to conclude their dialogue before resuming his attacks. This is familiar to me from many old Godzilla and Gamera movies so I'm inclined to think it's deliberate.

I would argue the connexion Godzilla had to the atom bomb in the Honda Ishiro 1954 film was as a symbol not only of the terrible destruction caused by the bombs, and the accumulating horrors in their aftermath, but of the terrifying, unknown consequences of tampering with physics at the atomic level. Yamazaki has made a film that's more of a World War II allegory, with Godzilla symbolising the bomb and, to a lesser (but significant) extent, the U.S. He spends a lot of time showing the protagonists' normal lives in the shanty towns of post-war Japan (another plot formula element of kaiju films is that, despite the monster attacking a city of millions of people, somehow it's always the same four or five people who factor into all major decisions and events). In this context, he gives us a very typical, very modern, sentimental story about a handsome young man and a beautiful young woman who, despite living in close proximity, can't confess their love to each other over the course of years. Despite the houses built of scrap, there's never the sense of post-war squalor and desperation you get in a movie like 1948's Stray Dog (野良犬) or 1964's Gate of Flesh (肉体の門). As such, Yamazaki's invocation of post-war Japan comes off as cheap and shallow.

The girl in the story is called Noriko (Hamabe Minami), perhaps a nod to the several characters of that name played by Hara Setsuko in Ozu Yasujiro movies, though Ozu was unafraid to portray some of Hara's characters as mothers. In Ozu's 1960 film Late Autumn (秋日和), Hara plays a mother named Akiko. In Gojiro Minus One, the Noriko character has become foster mother of a baby called Akiko. Despite Japan now being filled with young divorced mothers (I've met quite a few), movies, TV series, and comics shrink at showing one to be a romantic heroine so there are many plot contrivances to explain why a young woman is caring for someone else's child (the starkest example is probably Spy Family). So the heroine can be both virgin and mother. It's surprising Catholicism isn't more popular around here.

I knew exactly what was going to happen to both Noriko and Shikishima at the end of the film about halfway through the movie, the formula was so rigid. The film's handling of the fight with Godzilla is somewhat more interesting.

A scientist (Hidetaka Yoshioka), who just happened to be a crewman on the same minesweeper boat as Shikishima (of course), comes up with a plan to use Godzilla's nuclear blast breath against him, causing him to sink to the ocean floor and then to come back up quickly again to be killed by decompression. As part of the plan, Shikishima must once again pilot a Zero to distract the beast. So now we have a kamikaze pilot fighting a symbol of the atomic bomb. You can guess where this is going but the movie doesn't have the guts to go quite as far as you might think--but Yamazaki lets a moment hang in which you're invited to ponder what if it did. I applaud the audacity of what Yamazaki almost did, it would have been downright Tarantino-esque. By not quite doing it, perhaps he leaves the audience more vividly imagining it. However, given the simplistic, formulaic, and oversentimentalised treatment of the post-war era otherwise, I would question the appropriateness of posing such a question in this context. Maybe that's one way new myths start to gain force.

Godzilla Minus One is now in theatres in the U.S. and Japan.

X Sonnet #1799

A creeping shade perverts the target word.
Above the common folks, a helmet shines.
A billion eyes have traced the lucky bird.
A darkness waits between the verdant pines.
The steady club could beat the head relaxed.
Without a number reckoned safe, we go.
No lion tamed could dodge the carnal tax.
A metal shaft has jumped the shaky bow.
With waiting lizards, life continues drunk.
For conversations, bombs will stop a day.
Enormous rabbits tear the mammoth's trunk.
And after flying, planes have naught to say.
In shades of green, the lover baked a cake.
But after all, preceding shows were faked.

A Smoggy Day in Kaiju Town

What a mess we've made of our planet. And who's going to clean it up? Godzilla! At least when the mess manifests as a giant monster as it does in 1971's Godzilla vs. Hedorah (ゴジラ対ヘドラ). Filled with strange jumps in the narrative and improbably lucky guesses from the humans that undercut the tension, this is still an extraordinarily stylish Godzilla movie with plenty of points of interest.

A beautiful singer (Keiko Mari) takes us through the opening credits with a groovy song in which she implores the fates to return our green forests and blue seas.

She reappears in a club scene later where a young man inexplicably hallucinates fish heads on her and the crowd.

The message about pollution is heavy handed, as it usually is, but the movie succeeds best when it's just plain weird. The villain, Hedorah, is actually an alien whom the scientist protagonist somehow deduces was created by a nuclear reaction before coming to earth and thriving on industrial waste. The old symbol of nuclear menace, meanwhile, Godzilla, is a hero at this point in the film series, sharing telepathic communications with the child protagonist (Hiroyuki Kawase).

In one scene, the kid watches his father, the scientist (Akira Yamauchi), go scuba diving to investigate the strange giant tadpoles that have been turning up. We see the man encounter Hedorah underwater and there's a cut to the kid vainly calling out for him on shore. And I thought, "Oh, the poor kid's lost his dad." But then there's a jump cut to the man in bed, back at home, with his son by his side, and there's a calm conversation about his injury. It feels odd, we definitely should have seen the man finally pulling himself out of the water. But half his face is disfigured, a little moment of horror that helps shore up emotional impact for the scene.

The movie also includes animated segments and altogether the production design is pretty good. The fight scenes are a little silly by this point, especially since Godzilla at this point had picked up a habit of wiping his mouth and bobbing and weaving like a boxer.

Godzilla vs. Hedorah is available on The Criterion Channel. Yeah, that's right.