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Yesterday, I heard that Godzilla Minus One (2023) was on Netflix starting June 1st. I don’t have Netflix, but I checked and it was available to rent and stream elsewhere so I watched it last night. Lucky me.

This was one of the very few movies I wanted to see in the theater. From the start, it received terrific reviews and was an authentic blockbuster made with the fraction of the budget Hollywood spends on most of their crap.

On top of all that, it won eight awards including an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, an Asian Film Award for Best Sound, and Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Film and Best Actor (Ryunosuke Kamiki). This one hit it out of the park. But would it live up to the hype?

Yes, it did.

The movie wasn’t what I expected. I knew it was a period piece, set in Japan at the end of World War Two, but not much more.

Oh, Spoiler Alert: If you didn’t see it in the theater and haven’t streamed it yet and you want to be surprised, stop reading here.

The movie starts with a Japanese fighter pilot landing his aircraft on the island of Odo. Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who didn’t want to die. Instead, he pretends there’s something wrong with his plane and lands on Odo where there are a group of aircraft mechanics assigned to handle this problem.

There’s nothing wrong with his aircraft, but the head mechanic Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) doesn’t blame him. He knows it is futile to throw your life away on a war they’ve already lost.

That night, a strange monster comes from the sea, something like a carnivorous dinosaur. The rifles the engineers have are useless and Tachibana tells Shikishima to use the guns on his plane. The pilot resists but eventually runs and enters his aircraft. The creature moves in front of the aircraft, but Shikishima panics and gets out of the plane right before Godzilla bites it in half.

The next morning, only Skikishima and Tachibana are still alive. Tachibana is furious at the pilot for being a coward and letting everyone die. When they’re evacuated, they tell their government that the Americans did it. Tachibana gives Shikishima the personal photos of the dead mechanics so he’ll remember.

Things are terrible at home in Tokyo which has been all but destroyed by the American air raids. Shikishima finds out his parents died. His neighbor Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando) blames him for shirking his duty and irrationally says if he had completed his suicide mission, none of the destruction would have happened.

Shikishima encounters a thief Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) who is running away from someone. She quickly shoves a package in his hands as she runs past. It’s a baby girl.

Eventually they are reunited and Noriko tells Shikishima that she told the baby’s dying mother she’d take care of her. Shikishima still has what’s left of his home and Noriko and baby Akiko (the toddler played by Sae Nagatani) move in over his objections. Eventually though, they form a reluctant family.

Through all this, you may be wondering whatever happened to Godzilla. This isn’t so much as a monster movie with people in it, but a movie about one man’s torment and journey of redemption that just happens to involve a monster.

Time passes.

American atomic tests in the Pacific mutates Godzilla making him much larger and more powerful, also endowing him with radioactive breath that can cause nuclear explosions. As if Japan hasn’t had enough of that.

Shikishima gets a job on a minesweeper with a motley but endearing crew including Yōji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), Captain of the minesweeper, Yuki Yamada (Shirō Mizushima) a young crewman who idolizes the military veterans, and Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) who was a Naval weapons engineer during the war. They all form a friendship, but Shikishima can’t let go of his guilt.

He eventually tells Noriko about what happened on Odo island including Godzilla. I found it amazing she easily accepted his story. I fully expected her to reject the dinosaur part of the tale, but she calmly believes his tale and tries to comfort him.

Meanwhile, the Americans discover something large and dangerous living in the ocean. It has destroyed some American ships and a submarine. It is heading toward Japan, but General MacArthur says due to tensions between them and the Soviets, the U.S. Military will not actively pursue the creature.

Japan has been disarmed and is left to face this threat alone. The Japanese government, in order to avoid a panic, chooses not to tell the population of the threat. Sasaki’s minesweeper is assigned to delay the creature until the last armed Japanese destroyer can arrive from Singapore. It doesn’t look good.

Their machine gun is useless, but Shikishima manages to detonate one of the mines they had collected in the monsters mouth, gravely injuring it. Unfortunately the beast regenerates almost instantly, so that doesn’t stop it. As Godzilla’s about to eat them, the destroyer arrives, guns a’blazing.

They hurt Godzilla but he destroys the ship, disappears and then later proceeds to Tokyo.

Shikishima is at home with Akiko when he hears on the radio that Godzilla is attacking Tokyo, specifically the Ginza where Noriko has taken a job (Sumiko watches the little girl when both of her “parents” are at work).

He leaves the child with Sumiko and rushes to Ginza.

Noriko is on a commuter train when Godzilla attacks. She barely escapes but when about to be trampled in the streets, Shikishima finds her and they run. Godzilla creates a blast with his breath and right before the shockwave hits the crowd, Noriko pushes Shikishima into an alley between two large buildings, saving his life. When he recovers and looks, everyone else, including Noriko, is gone. He vows revenge on the creature who has taken so much away from him (see where this is leading?).

Since the American and Japanese governments refuse to engage Godzilla, a civilian militia forms to take on the job. Noda turns out to be an engineering “big shot” and has devised a complicated plan to suddenly sink Godzilla into a deep ocean trench where hopefully the pressure crushes him. Plan B is to attach a big flotation device to the same Freon tanks that sank him and bring him up fast enough for explosive decompression to destroy him.

They find an experimental fighter built toward the end of the war that Shikishima can fly. He’ll be the distraction, luring Godzilla into the trap. However he has a plan of his own. He knows the monster can be destroyed from the inside, so he plans to have a bomb placed in the plane and then fly it down Godzilla’s throat. His war as a kamikaze pilot will finally be complete.

He locates Tachibana who still hates his guts, and begs him to get the plane in shape to fly. The mechanic finally agrees because he sees the pilot is serious about being willing to give his life to save his country.

Leaving Akiko and a bunch of cash with Sumiko with a note telling her to take care of the child, he’s ready.

Godzilla screws up the plan by arriving on land too soon, but Shikishima attacks with his plane and decoys him back into the water.

During the fierce battle, Sumiko receives a telegram meant for Shikishima which we’ll get to in a minute.

Plan A and B don’t work. Godzilla isn’t crushed and when they try to bring him back up, he disables the floatation device and is stuck at 800 meters under the surface.

Mizushima, who was left behind because he was too young, has organized a bunch of tug boats (how did he know they’d be useful?) to help the two destroyers bring Godzilla to the surface. The monster rises and is injured but can still fight. It starts to use its breath weapon on the helpless ships.

Time freezes. This is Shikishima’s moment. He drives his aircraft directly at Godzilla’s mouth and before the creature can release his breath, crashes into the monster, basically blowing his head off. Actually, it was the nuclear reaction inside Godzilla that causes him to fall apart.

To no one’s surprise, Tachibana had told Shikishima that his experimental plane had an ejection seat. He managed to bail out a second before the crash and survives. He’s a national hero and has finally put his demons to rest, or most of them.

Getting back to shore, Sumiko meets him with Akiko and shows him the telegram. Noriko is alive! He rushes to the hospital with the little girl. Part of Noriko’s face is bandaged and she has a broken arm. They joyfully reunite and there is a seemingly happy ending.

Seemingly.

A black mark is seen on the side of Noriko’s neck which the film’s director later confirmed is some genetic material from Godzilla.

As we see chunks of Godzilla sinking in the ocean, they start to pulse the writhe, coming back to life.

The end.

A few interesting things.

Although Godzilla was mutated by American nuclear tests, the film doesn’t directly mention Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Also, despite the fact that after the war, the Americans occupied Japan, no American soldiers are ever seen in the film.

At one point, Noda gives an impassioned speech about how their war against Godzilla is different than the war they just lost. This time, life will be valued. In the other war, tanks were thinly armored, supply chains routinely broke down so many lives were lost to starvation, and suicide missions were considered the norm. Not this time. This war would be waged so people could live, not die.

I found that a refreshing criticism of a Japanese film maker about his country’s history.

Performances by the cast were excellent, particularly Ryunosuke Kamiki who was absolutely outstanding.

Godzilla’s design was deliberately “old school” as a call back to other classic Japanese Godzilla movies.

This Japanese made film, created with a fraction of the money Hollywood routinely wastes on its junk, used basic and universal themes of loss, guilt, friendship, comradery, devotion, love, family (especially love of children), and redemption and wove them into a masterpiece. Akiko could have been an unwanted and disposable baby (as so many think of them in our country), and might have been in a lesser film. But she became the lynchpin, along with the supposed loss of Noriko, to motivate Shikishima into an act of self-sacrificing heroism.

If American filmmakers would concentrate on that rather than the other “progressive” issues they find necessary to stuff into our eyes and ears, audiences would be flocking back to theaters in droves.

But especially with June being what it is, that’s not going to happen. Our entertainment industry has fallen down the rabbit hole of special interests and select groups rather than embracing the human interests that encompass a wider mankind.

If you want to see not only a great film but a template on how to make a great film, watch Godzilla Minus One.

One last note. The actors all speak Japanese so make sure your subtitles are turned on (unless you understand Japanese). I took a bunch of foreign film classes the first time I was an undergrad, so that’s no big deal for me, but your mileage may vary.