February 12, 2025

GODZILLA MINUS ONE (JAPANESE) (2023) – The ultimate and best Godzilla movie ever!

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

Godzilla-Minus-One

Godzilla Minus One has generated a lot of positive publicity and even won the coveted Academy Award for Best Achievement in Visual Effects in this year’s Oscar ceremony! After finally getting hold of a copy of this movie to watch, I can understand why the film got all the accolades. Godzilla Minus One not only manages to present the best and most dynamic looking Godzilla seen on screen, it does this with an accompanying story that is both touching and relevant to the times.

When the film begins, we are introduced to its main character, Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who chickened out on carrying out his task and landed his plane in a base for war planes engineers in the pretext of having engine problems. He soon finds himself facing an even greater life-threatening situation when Godzilla appeared effectively destroying the base and almost everyone there. Story then progress to the post-war period where our main character is haunted by the memories of the encounter combined with guilt over his cowardly act. Having establish a strong background plot, the movie cleverly incorporates Godzilla into the picture which somehow resonates with the lives of our main character and the people that he had inadvertently grown close with over the post war years. This is where the heart and soul of the movie lies touching on multiple themes of anti-war, guilt, hope, redemption, and of course love.

Because of its strong storyline, the movie does not find the need to have Godzilla appearing every few minutes to create incoherent mayhem just for the sake of providing “action”. Instead, each appearance by Godzilla is a calculated path for the plot to progress to its inevitable conclusion. I can attest that each time the monster appears, we are treated to an audio and visual no hold bars spectacle that outshines many Hollywood movies today. That it was all done at the fraction of the cost of what a typical Hollywood production would spend to produce a lesser result is a feat that is rightfully acknowledged with a fully deserved Oscar. The film’s director Takashi Yamazaki proves he is as good if not better than the Hollywood greats like Spielberg and Lucas with this milestone achievement.

Finally, I feel I need to have a word on the film’s title and the meaning behind it. I admit I was a bit confused by it and thought the minus one meant, “one Godzilla down, many more to go”. I had to Google it and would like to share what I found: “It was believed that the country could never reach a lower point, but the movie makes that happen with Godzilla bringing terror to the country. Since the movie puts Japan into a position lower than zero, it’s now “minus one.”

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