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Godzilla Minus One Movie Review

Godzilla Minus One is a 2023 Japanese kaiju film directed by Takashi Yamazaki and starring Ryunosuke Kamiki. It’s one of the best Godzilla movies.

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“Is your war finally over?“

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Godzilla attacks postwar Japan and it is up to the scientists and one kamikaze pilot to try to stop the monster. The movie that won the Oscar for best VFX (becoming the first foreign film to win in that category) and a renowned masterpiece by numerous critics, it finally came to digital, so that I could see it. And I have to say that I was slightly disappointed. It’s a very good movie, don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t call it the best in the franchise. It’s one of the best for sure, but it’s inferior to the original 1954 classic. It’s quite on par with the Gareth Edwards effort.

Godzilla Minus One has that authenticity going for it. It’s a Japanese movie made by Japanese filmmakers and it’s set in postwar Japan, so it functioned pretty much as a direct successor to the very first movie. Bringing it back to its roots was a terrific idea that worked and the movie has that classical, almost Spielbergian touch that made it seem both old-fashioned and timeless.

Ryunosuke Kamiki was excellent as Shikishima, the emotionally troubled protagonist of the story. Through him, the movie explored PTSD and the survivor’s guilt. The treatment of the latter was particularly effective as we rarely see that very real issue being depicted in movies, let alone blockbusters. I would have liked even more exploration of these themes and how the war and the atomic bombing affected the Japanese, but for the most part it sufficed.

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The supporting players fared much worse unfortunately. The scientist character was a fun, charismatic guy and I did really like Noriko as the main character’s girlfriend, but all of these people got so little to do that their development was seriously blunted. And the movie has so many characters, so they rarely get to properly develop them. For instance, Sakura Ando is in this cast and she got so little to do, which was quite frustrating.

The common disaster uniting them and all of the people getting together to come up with a plan to deal with the impending threat felt very Spielbergian, especially all of the optimism and almost cheesy emoting of the characters, so it’s no wonder that the director himself is a big supporter of the movie. I would have personally cut the section where they come up with a plan how to kill Godzilla at least in half in order to make room for more action and more character development. It seriously dragged in that part.

But Godzilla Minus One still featured a lot of action and truly impressive special effects for such a small budget. Hopefully, this movie will finally inspire Hollywood to spend less and create more believable effects on smaller budgets as this proves it’s very much doable. Godzilla looked so good – I loved the scaly design, the utilization of his amphibian lifestyle, and that blue lighting that made the monster look so cool and dangerous.

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The final battle was difficult to believe and a bit too cheesy, but the destruction of Tokyo was phenomenally executed across the board with the only detractor being the score that did not fit the dangerous mood well at all. But the score thankfully improved afterward and the overall sound and cinematography were both superb. It’s a fun, objectively very well made movie that was still slightly overrated to me.