Godzilla Minus One, Minus Color (2024) ★ ★ ★★

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"Because, my war isn't over yet." 

This line, delivered by Ryuunosuke Kamiki, defines "Godzilla Minus One" (2023). Set at the end of World War II, the film portrays his character as a haggard symbol of the pathos of postwar Japan, a nation wracked by defeat at the hands of Western nuclear might. He is a failed kamikaze pilot who defected in a very un-Japanese and dishonorable way from his very Japanese and honorable suicide mission to hide out at a military repair-shop called Odo Island, and is immediately met with the quiet judgment of his peers; yes, the war is obviously over, and has been definitively lost, but still, he should have obeyed orders. 

I viewed this film from a limited lens of having only seen one Godzilla movie in my life: "King Kong vs. Godzilla" (1962), an orgy of model train crashes and corner-store sparklers that I watched on a loop as a kid. It has been widely hailed as the worst of the Japanese monster movies, but I loved that about it, and to this day consider it a masterpiece of high camp. I expected writer and director Takashi Yamazaki's fire-breathing beast to be a step up, and was not disappointed. This Godzilla is a big step up, pardon the pun. All the special effects magic is concentrated on the monster, which results in a nuclear lizard that looks more alive and menacing than ever. But the beauty of the film is not in its electrifying urban destruction scenes; Yamazaki's screenplay is really a poignant tale about love, redemption, and forgiveness, and the unbelievable lengths people will go for absolution. 

Kamiki's character, Koichi, returns from the front to a nation that has been reduced to rubble, where he unwillingly adopts a woman (Minami Hamabe) and a daughter (Sae Nagatani), with the understanding that there are no understandings anymore. The woman is not his wife, she is not the child's mother, and he takes them in anyway, because when there is nothing left to live for, you live for anything. I'm not inferring this -- the film makes it clear. The vacuum of civilization left by Hiroshima forces the Japanese to pick through whatever semblance of a national psyche is left, at the risk of teetering into senselessness and insanity, and this is expressed on every face, in the long shadows cast by surprisingly resilient little huts and shacks, in the smoldering darkness of the daytime, and the flickering fires of the night.  

Newly-burdened by this makeshift family, Koichi becomes a crewman on a minesweeper and meets wizened naval engineer Kenji Noda, played by Hidetaka Yoshioka, whose intellect leads to a plan to defeat Godzilla that the younger man carries out. When asked why he never married the woman he took in, Koichi admits that he is still fighting his own war. He gives an answer that illustrates a veteran's personal shell-shock and grief, which is when the monster B-movie reveals itself to be about the inner campaigns that rage on long after the guns have gone cold. Munetaka Aoki's character serves as the protagonist for Koichi's guilt, a retired mechanic who considers the younger man's very existence to be ample testimony of his failures as a soldier. No character in "Godzilla Minus One" says the word "honor," but its thematic subtext lives in their expressive faces, and I applaud the director's restraint; the world doesn't need the kitsch version of Japanese culture, it needs a healthy dose of reality. Who knew you could find that in a Godzilla flick? 

"Godzilla Minus One, Minus Color" isn't just a monochrome reissue of the original version. Colorist Masahiro Ishiyama was tasked with remaking the entire look of the film, and I think he succeeded. It feels like it was released by a Hollywood studio in 1945, which is interesting, because the original "Godzilla" was released in 1954, and looks a touch cruder than Western movies from the decade prior. I was struck by how the little details of this period piece took on a new life; the awkward tailoring of midcentury clothing, the earthy textures of wood and paper and oily metal, the high-contrast interior and exterior scenes interspersed with dark and intentionally underdeveloped interludes of all-business moments, all of it works. More striking to me is that until now, I had never seen a contemporary period film successfully achieve the "feel" of the era it sought to imitate. Ishiyama gets full marks for putting the audience squarely in the 1940s, even when crumbling buildings and atomic explosions fill the screen. 

I can't bring myself to give something in this genre five stars, and it's hard to explain why. Perhaps "Godzilla Minus One, Minus Color" deserves it, and I'm being stingy. Tough to say. I think that this piece, which is as near-perfect as it gets for what it offers, is a victim of the past. While watching it, I couldn't shake the feeling that Godzilla can only be taken so far, and with six hundred other Godzilla movies out there, it's difficult to view a new one as anything more than redundant. But Godzilla was always symbolic, an analogy to the crushing devastation of nuclear annihilation, less about scary lizards, yet no film had ever fully tapped into the psychological torture that Fat Man and Little Boy wrought on a nation -- until now. Finally, after all these years, we have a giant lizard monster that meets the unwavering spirit of true survivors. 

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