Godzilla Minus One: Some Thoughts

I have been watching Godzilla films since the late 1950s or early ’60s, when the edited American version (1956) of the 1954 Japanese original was released and was finally shown on TV. I have since seen all 37 films in the franchise at least twice, some even more, and still enjoy watching them (readers here will recall my previous posts about Godzilla and the films…).*

The ’54 original film became my favourite of the franchise when I first watched it in the early 2000s (it was not released to North American audiences until 2004; until then all we had was the 1956 American edit). But the latest Japanese film, 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, has taken over that slot. It is the 21st-century remake of the original that the series deserved, with all the best technology and techniques behind it.

This is a seriously good film. The acting is excellent; the effects spectacular; the reimagined Godzilla is simply awesome. The film itself is gorgeous. Sets and scenery are stunning. The look of postwar Japan feels very real and gritty. The story is deeply touching (the humans and their story are really the core of the film). I recently watched it for the second time and was even more impressed than on my first viewing. This is simply a terrific movie, even if you are not a Godzilla aficionado.

Shin Godzilla (2016) has been a close second favourite for me since my first viewing, and the look of the monster in Godzilla Minus One owes a lot to it. Shin entirely re-imagined Godzilla, even including a bizarre, threatening larval form. And buried within the film is a dark satire about bureaucracy and government inertia in the face of a massive threat (Shin is really about the official response, where Minus One is about how survivors cope and respond).

The second American film, from 2014, is my third choice because it felt like a sincere attempt to recreate Godzilla for a new generation, while respecting the long history of the franchise. The subsequent American Godzilla films are good for spectacle, but lack the humanity and the more relatable characters of the first (and none of the American versions have the humanity of either Shin or Minus One). You seldom feel the tragedy of the rampage through cities the same way as you do in both Shin and Minus One. They certainly are flashy, and the effects are gobsmacking, but they lack the depth of Minus One.**

Like the monster seen in Shin, the monster in Minus One is horrific-looking, suitably threatening by its size and appearance. Changes in the size of its head in relation to the body made it look particularly sinister in Shin, as did the new arms and teeth. The head and arms were remade again in Minus One, making Godzilla more like the suitmation character than in Shin; somewhat more akin to the American Godzilla’s from 2014. Godzilla’s face was given a more human look, a more expressive range than in Shin, if such a description makes sense. It looks more like an evolution and upgrade from the previous Toho films than Shin did. The American-made Godzilla from 2014 on has a certain masculine beauty in comparison (the 1998 Godzilla is much more lizard-like).

Minus One is the second Toho Godzilla film after Shin Godzilla to use a CGI monster rather than an actor in a latex suit. For thirty movies, Toho used these suits and animatronics for their Godzilla. While I loved watching the actors in suits lumbering around the sets, smashing through model cities and towns, CGI presents new opportunities and actions and a lot more realism. The latext-suit versions also required a lot of large, complex, and expensive miniature sets of cities that the actors could trash. There’s a whole art to making those miniature cities that is lost in CGI versions.

Unlike the American versions, this film is about the people, not merely the monster. Scraping a living from the rubble of a bombed-out Japanese city gives it a gritty feel. While it isn’t always true of all the earlier Toho movies, in most of them the characters (actors) are as important, if not more so, than the monster(s). They matter; they are not merely props for the rampages of the kaiju (monsters); and their stories are not simply filler.

One of the focal points in the original film, but whitewashed out in later films is that people die when Godzilla attacks. It was never meant to be sentimental, but rather a metaphor for the effects of the atomic bomb.  The first film had harsh scenes of people crushed by its stomping feet, destroyed by its fiery breath, or by buildings the monster destroys in its rampage through Tokyo. In Shin and Minus One, people die again (and do so, somewhat, in the American versions). The tragedy of Godzilla’s rampage is felt by the audience in those Japanese films in a way that is not as evident in the American films (although the 2014 film tries). That impact on humanity was washed away in later Toho films as the franchise became more camp and more family-friendly and even made Godzilla into a defender of people, not a destroyer.

Over the years since the franchise began, Toho has attempted to relaunch or at least reset the storyline back to something more like the original, although in different time periods. Intervening films, including their plots and other kaiju are usually forgotten during the reset. This means there is no continuous plot emanating from the original to today’s releases. The first major relaunch was Godzilla 1985. The 1998 and 2014 American films were also relaunches.  Then came Shin Godzilla which moved the timeline to the modern era with an entirely recreated monster, and finally Godzilla Minus One, which is a sort-of prequel to Shin, showing us the creature’s origin and first appearance in the mid-late 1940s. However, while these two films are not connected by a coherent timeline, and focus on different levels of response to the monster, a proposed sequel to Minus One might bridge that gap.

If you have not seen Godzilla Minus One, I recommend you give it a chance. I think it’s well worth watching by any film buff, regardless of your affection for kaiju. I expect it will remain my favourite in the franchise for many, many years to come.

Notes:

* The list of Godzilla films on IMDB.com includes three full-length anime films. Years ago, when we still subscribed to Netflix, I attempted to watch them, but found the animation style unattractive and the story too far from the Toho timeline. Toho is, of course, the Japanese film company that produced most of these films. The full list of Godzilla films, in chronological order of release, including the anime and American versions follows. Note that some of the film titles may differ in earlier release versions due to alternate translations of the Japanese titles:

1. Godzilla (1954)
2. Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
3. Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956; the American edition of the ’54 original)
4. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
5. Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)
6. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
7. Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)
8. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
9. Son of Godzilla (1967)
10. Destroy All Monsters (1968)
11. All Monsters Attack (1969)
12. Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)
13. Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972)
14. Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)
15. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)
16. Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)
17. The Return of Godzilla (1984)
18. Godzilla 1985 (1985; aka The Return of Godzilla released in Japan in 1984)
19. Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)
20. Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991)
21. Godzilla vs. Mothra (1992)
22. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993)
23. Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994)
24. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)
25. Godzilla (1998; American)
26. Godzilla 2000: Millennium (1999)
27. Godzilla vs. Megaguirus (2000)
28. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)
29. Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002)
30. Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003)
31. Godzilla: Final Wars (2004)
32. Godzilla (2014; American)
33. Shin Godzilla (2016)
34. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (2017, anime)
35. Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (2018, anime)
36. Godzilla: The Planet Eater (2018, anime)
37. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019; American)
38. Godzilla vs. Kong (2021; American)
39. Godzilla Minus One (2023)
40. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024; American)

I own all of the above on DVD or Blu-Ray, except for Godzilla vs. Biollante, which, because of licensing, was only produced in DVD and Blu-Ray one year, and not re-released until 2025. Thanks to the Dictator Trump’s tariff war, the price has escalated well beyond my meagre budget.

** The first American Godzilla film (1998) was actually a lot of fun, although it was less like a Godzilla movie than it was a remake of The Creature From 20,000 Fathoms. Sadly, the shirt Godzilla purists panned it and it remains the pariah in the franchise, but I’ve seen it several times and find it enjoyable and amusing.

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