For days after, I was been unable to get the haunting score for Godzilla Minus One out of my head. Over a month later, it still creeps into my mind. Rarely popping in suddenly, but a quiet buildup before I realise I’m replaying it.
The word “haunting” is used quite liberally, it can evoke any manner of feelings in different readers. Here, I think it’s the most apt word to describe how the music is stuck in my mind. It’s not an uplifting theme I’m replaying out of joy. It’s not a sad piece I replay for catharsis. To be honest, I don’t know enough about music theory to even say if I like its themes or melodies or other music terms.
What I can say is it’s following me. It so perfectly evoked a sense of horror, isolation, desperation, death, calamity, and powerlessness. During the film I noticed the score and how good it was, but I really didn’t think I’d keep thinking about it. But it follows me. It really truly haunts me.
Godzilla Minus One is a remarkable, amazing movie with music, performances, scenes, and themes that will haunt audiences. Not simply as horror, either. There’s a struggle for life and community in the film that is positive and hopeful, but every bit as haunting as the horror because it is a struggle. Every scrap of connection, of purpose, of happiness, of life that the characters get is born out of pain and endurance.
This post is, overall, a positive review of Godzilla Minus One. It is one of the darkest entries in the franchise, yet has one of the most optimistic endings (if you interpret it that way, there is room for debate). It is a meditation on war: how regular people are used and their lives discarded, and the ruins they’re left to rebuild within.
The main character, who appears in very nearly every scene, is Kōichi. Near the end of the War, in mid-1945, he is a kamikaze pilot. But he feigns a malfunction with his plane in order to fly off to a mechanics’ base on Odo Island and avoid the fighting. If you know Godzilla movies, Odo Island is probably a tip-off.
This is the character of whose point-of-view almost every second of the film is told. Someone who wasn’t able to go through with acts of war, especially suicide attacks, and yet who is blamed for Japan’s losses. One woman in the rubble of Tokyo, who has lost her family and informs Kōichi of his own parents’ death, yells at him that “cowards” like him are why they lost.
Godzilla Minus One is about ordinary people, in the aftermath of a devastating war they were led into by a fascist government, learning how to want to live. All of the characters struggle with going on with life, but Kōichi especially feels the guilt imposed on him that he didn’t kill himself in an attack that wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.
The movie spends time showing a slow rebuilding of lives from late 1945 to 1947. Many neighbourhoods of Tokyo remain rubble, even as small new houses are build up. Characters make friends, move in together, raise children, but still remain distant. Kōichi has PTSD and night terrors.
By the time Godzilla, irradiated by nuclear weapons testing, starts devastating Japan and threatening what very little these people had managed to piece back together, it’s easy to feel like the struggle isn’t worth it, that it’s time to go down. Go down fighting, but still go down.
But that is not what this film is about. These characters, in all their pain, have to pull together, and the final act of the film is a beautiful call to live, in the face of catastrophic horror. They are forced to ask themselves whether giving their lives is really dying for what they love. If they’re not willing to at least try to live, is a death a noble sacrifice or is it a waste? The movie makes them ask what they’re willing to live for.
I might sound like I’m over-hyping the radioactive lizard movie, and I am. There’s a few effects shots that don’t quite work that detract from some of the tension in a few scenes. Not all of the scene transitions work, with abrupt cuts that feel misplaced. Oh, and there’s the misogyny.
That’s right, it’s time for another round of Trevor Rains On Everyone’s Parade By Criticising A Thing That’s Universally Praised.
Noriko and Sumiko are the only two adult women characters. Both are introduced with the potential to be fascinating as they develop. Sumiko is the woman who slaps Kōichi and says he was a coward for not dying in a suicide attack. Her arc follows the same themes, painfully coming to terms with the cruelty of the war and slowly accepting Kōichi. But so much of that development is hidden behind her maternal role.
Noriko appears as a woman who has lost her home and her family and has rescued an orphaned baby. Kōichi allows her to stay with him, and she goes through the movie as little more than a mother figure for the child and a love interest for Kōichi. And since neither of them know how to raise a baby, Sumiko is largely reduced to a babysitter. While this does help advance Sumiko’s arc, it nevertheless means that the two, and only two, adult women are predominantly there to be mothers, and we get very little more of Sumiko’s development.
Let’s be honest: However beautiful, effective, and quite often brilliant the rest of the film is, it doesn’t at any point think that women could be more relevant characters. I truly want to recommend the movie for its reflections on war (though I have a caveat about that I’ll get to in a moment), but we have to admit when movies do some things right and other things wrong.
I don’t want to get into spoilers (yet, that will come a little further down, and there will be advanced warning) but the treatment of women goes beyond them existing just as mother figures. What happens to Noriko (because she has little agency, the movie largely happens to her after her first scene) is Kōichi’s primary motivation in the final act. She exists to propel the male characters’ journeys.
It is so frustrating just how often I have to say “this movie is brilliant, oh but the writers didn’t think women mattered just fyi.” And, to be honest, I think we shouldn’t say movies are brilliant if they treat women like this anyway. We can say aspects of those movies are brilliant, but it’s too easy, especially for men like myself, to overlook how writers and directors ignore or deny agency to women characters.
So while I still say this is a positive review, I think anyone who is really sick of women characters existing as mother/wife prizes for men to come home to, and upon whom physical pain is inflicted to make the men sad, should know that up front going in. Or, hey, don’t see it. There are lots of brilliant anti-war movies out there, if you read this and think “oh that sounds pretty shit, count me out,” you’re not missing some irreplaceable. No movie, ever, is irreplaceable.
There is a lot to love about what the movie gets right. I was weeping at some scenes in that third act. But damn, especially after Shin Godzilla gave us multiple developed, complex, and plot-integral women, why did Minus One have to go backwards?
You might say that however many points I give this film for the positives, I have to give it a minus one for it’s handling of women.
Hahaha.
I’m a delight.
With that, it’s time to dig into spoilers.
I’ll start by explaining more explicitly what I did not like about Noriko and Sumiko’s arcs. If you don’t want spoilers, but you do want some clarity about what I mean by “treating women badly”, I’ll cover that, and then get into spoilers about what I think is good.
That way if you decide you still want to see the movie, you’ll have some nice surprises while being fully prepared for the bad.
OK. Ready for spoilers?
Let’s go.
Noriko’s first scene takes place almost immediately after the end of the war. Amidst the rubble, she’s taken in an orphaned baby and has to steal to feed it. She bumps into Kōichi and immediately entrusts him with the baby while she has to hide from authorities. When she returns for the child, she is adamant about protecting the child, and manages to get the traumatised and self-hating Kōichi to start to open up a little.
That’s about it for her agency as a character. From then on she’s largely background, with scenes hinting she’s falling in love with Kōichi, but they’re not scenes that feature much of her they’re scene about him not being able to accept love. Which in theory is fine, but without seeing more of her, even from his POV, it doesn’t feel like she matters much. When she gets a job in another part of the city, it seems like she might be staking out her own path in life, pursuing her own career, but it turns out it’s just to situate her in a neighbourhood during a Godzilla attack.
And as Godzilla shoots its trademark atomic breath creating another devastating explosion, Noriko pushes Kōichi to safety but is caught in the blast herself.
It’s important to understand that killing off female characters is not bad. Using deaths of characters, of any gender, to create drama and then having other characters use their grief as motivation is not bad.
What’s bad is the extent to which women in fiction disproportionately exist for the sole purpose of dying a horrific death to motivate a male protagonist. Writer Gail Simone coined the term “fridging” to describe this phenomenon, after a particular gruesome issue of the Green Lantern comic in which the hero find his girlfriend’s corpse jammed into his fridge for no reason than to shock the reader and make our male hero have a sad. There are so few women in this movie, and they don’t do much beyond mother a child and/or fall in love with Kōichi. I would absolutely call this an instance of “fridging”.
But wait, there’s more! As annoying as this was, there is a way this could have worked. More agency for Noriko, and more development for Sumiko, would have made this feel less like fridging and just part of the story and its themes. Kōichi ends up choosing life even though he’s lost so much, including Noriko, because he finally sees a future for himself. It’s beautiful and it could have worked even better.
But actually surprise Noriko survived. Which, again, could have worked. The happy ending is so blatantly contrived that it kind of fits the movie’s themes to perfection. This is a movie about surviving and thriving and living and loving. Noriko bears the scars of radiation from the attack, but she’s alive, and reunited with Kōichi and their adopted child. It works! Only it doesn’t, because all that lack of agency and development before is even more highlighted. The movie simultaneously manages to fridge Noriko and keep her as a prize for the hero.
As I type this I again wonder if I’m being too harsh. It is, after all, a movie about Kōichi. Like Oppenheimer, there simply isn’t a lot of room in the film to be about anyone else. But like Oppenheimer, I have to call BS on that argument. It’s not like Kōichi’s life was devoid of women, women still existed in post-war Japan and had a lot to contribute. Even if we want to keep the core cast small and just have these two women as the only ones, the choice of how to show Kōichi’s relationship to them is itself an active choice. What scenes Kōichi has with them, how they unfold, what we get to see of them, even if it is constrained by Kōichi’s point-of-view, does not have to be this narrow.
So that’s where I’ll leave the negative side of things. If you’re willing to endure some fridging, I think you’ll find the rest of the movie has a tremendous amount going for it. Stupendous performances, gorgeous score, and a strong commitment to valuing life. But as I said, we really need to stop grading sexism on a curve just because most of a movie is good.
Oh boy, I’ll get to you soon, Oppenheimer. I’m coming for you.
How Minus One views the war is something I don’t have the space to get into here. Not being Japanese myself, there’s quite a lot about the cultural context for how the war is normally portrayed and discussed that I am missing. The film’s writer and director, Takashi Yamazaki, made a movie about a kamikaze pilot once before, 2013’s The Eternal Zero. Another legendary and fiercely anti-war and anti-nationalism Japanese director, Hayao Miyazaki, detested Yamazaki’s Eternal Zero and condemned it for being based on lies. Yamazaki, of course, rejected Miyazaki’s interpretation. But not by taking a clear stance on the war. The movie was based on a novel by Naoki Kyakuta, who is himself a far-right, war-crimes-denying, monstrous nationalist (which I learned from the same article that contains Miyazaki’s quotes). Yamazaki tried to play it both ways, which makes a bit of sense if you want to actually get your movie out there in a culture that doesn’t like acknowledging its government’s crimes (I’m from the US, I get it) but there’s a limit to how much you can pretend you’re not being political when you keep making movies about one of the most politically sensitive eras of history for your country.
I have not seen The Eternal Zero, I bring up the contention because going into a film about a kamikaze pilot, only knowing that the director had been subject to controversy for his depiction of the war before, made me uncertain what to think about it here.
I personally felt that Minus One does a good job excoriating the Japanese government’s “kill yourself for us” attitude. Everyone who tells Kōichi that he was wrong to not kill himself is definitively shown to be wrong, and every one of them expresses regret for ever thinking that. Granted, it’s still far cry from actually condemning imperial Japan. It’s one thing to say a war was handled badly, or even that war is generally bad, it’s another thing entirely to say “the government of my country was straight up evil in this time period”. There are veteran characters that did make me think “so, uh, what did you do in the war?”
There is also a rejection of war as glorious. A younger character who wasn’t old enough to serve keeps expressing regret he didn’t get to fight for his country. Near the end, one of the veterans grabs his collar, threatening to strike him and yells at him that he should never ever want to go to war. That war is horrible, and war is hell. That truly serving your country means protecting the people in it, to live for tomorrow, not to go kill. That, to me, seems effective.
But again, I lack the cultural context. If it were an American movie, I might more strongly point out how easy it is to say “war is hell” without taking responsibility for causing it. Many American movies about the Iraq War want to show the trauma inflicted on our soldiers without acknowledging that the US government bears blame for their pain, or that some of our soldiers committed war crimes.
I may expand on this later, as I personally struggle to understand the praise for one of the most popular Godzilla movies, Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidora: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. In that one, Godzilla isn’t a creation of nuclear weapons or nuclear anything, it’s a spiritual entity powered by the anguished souls of all those killed in the war, including those Japan killed in its many war crimes. That’s very interesting! Now Godzilla represents the crimes the Imperial Army committed that were never redressed, that to this day are often suppressed by the current government. Yet Godzilla is defeated by creatures powered by the spirits of Japanese soldiers. Which. I dunno, seems to take away from the interesting message.
I’ve never known if I was simply missing really important culturally-specific context, or if the hype for that movie was overblown. I’m similarly wary of over-praising Minus One, lest I be missing some crucial signs of nationalism that I shouldn’t forgive.
Now for one last spoiler about something I loved loved loved.
The movie is brimming with homages and references and nods to the whole Godzilla franchise. Part of the plan to destroy Godzilla in this one (which, incidentally, isn’t a bad plan! I may have to write a post about the scientific validity of it) involves bubbles in a way that I have to believe is an intentional reference to the special effects used in the original 1954 film.
What I want to highlight is the music. The original compositions are haunting and beautiful, yes yes I’ve said all that, but composer Naoki Satō made exquisite use of the original 1954 themes as well.
The first we see of the mutated Godzilla in Tokyo is the first we hear of the creature’s 1954 theme by Akira Ifikube. There are many great themes in the ’54 film, and there’s been an interesting evolution. One of them is a bit of a fast-paced march, which is used as the theme for the Japanese Self-Defence Forces. But after a few more movies in the franchise, it became Godzilla’s theme. Even the recent American films from Legendary Studios uses what was originally the JSDF theme for Godzilla.
In Minus One, when Godzilla is destroying Tokyo, we only hear the original original theme. I kept waiting for the JSDF theme to hit because it’s just accepted as Godzilla’s theme now, but it didn’t.
And then, we get to the climax. With the government strangled by bureaucracy and foreign governments unwilling to help, ordinary citizens come up with a plan to stop the monster themselves. Regular people assembling whatever boats they can. Scientists, sailors, veterans, workers, fishermen, all together.
Godzilla’s atomic breath narrowly misses them, and realising how a direct hit would kill them all, they debate calling it off and trying to escape. But our main scientist implores them to try. We hear the original 1954 score building up again, rising and rising as we zoom in on the commander, who thinks it over before announcing “Commence Operation <Whatever-it-was-called>” and then
BOOM! The JSDF theme. Returned to its usage as a theme for defence. For heroism. For ordinary people working together.
I wanted to cheer. That was right up there with Cap saying “Avengers! … assemble” and then Alan Silvestri’s Avengers theme blaring.
Satō you clever clever man. Or was it director Takashi Yamazaki who requested this? Either way, I absolutely loved it.
So that’s my take on Godzilla Minus One. What’s good is incredible, what’s bad is nothing new but is so frustrating that we have to keep litigating “can women be full characters”. My current ranking of Godzilla films is
- Godzilla (1954)
- Shin Godzilla
- Godzilla Minus One
In part because Minus One‘s treatment of women bugs me while Shin has multiple complex women who contribute to the plot. But I also feel like Shin‘s political satire is really effective and that it deserves the number two slot either way.
And because I’m not sure how to feel about GMK, I’m not sure what I place fourth on the list. Maybe King Kong vs. Godzilla, because it’s funny and also satirical.
The point is, I think way too much about Godzilla, and if you’ve read the entire post then you’ve now also thought too much about Godzilla. Gotcha.
Haggis & Hash Browns 