Godzilla Minus One

 

Finally I got back to the movies and boy did I enjoy returning.

Today’s film was a Japanese  version of the country’s own original monster movie from 1954

A retelling of the Godzilla story from the perspective of the post war Japanese people.

It’s an interesting movie and strange as it would seem, a very emotional one as we follow the story of a thrown together nuclear ( literally) family of Shikishima ( Ryunosuke Kamiki) a kamiski pilot who refused to crash his plane, and Noriko ( Minami Hamabe) a young woman who saved a baby (Sae Nagatani) during the firestorm on Tokyo 

One pissed off Dinosaur

This chaste family Unit try to forge an existence in post war Japan where most of the population are haunted by ghosts of the war, living in squalor ,fear of the H bomb threat , and coping with the internalised anger at their own Government for dragging them through a war which degraded them. 

Indeed the whole message from Godzilla minus one ,is about redemption and one of saving face. 

Director Takashi Yamazaki interestingly has the general public, the old soldiers and sailors from the war to fight a rather bad tempered and nasty Godzilla and the destruction set pieces have a wonderfully vintage and slightly old fashioned feel to them, almost as if we were back in the man-in -a-suit 1954 original.

yamazaki also makes his protagonists incredibly real and somewhat vulnerable , and when Noriko is cornered by Godzilla as she travels in a train in the city of Ginza ( a total homage to the L train destruction scene in the original King Kong)  It is real hand to the mouth stuff , as Shikishima turns up to save her.

You care about this nuclear family, and you care about the real people devastated by a war most of them never wanted. Godzilla Minus One has lots to say about the horrors of war and less to say about a bad tempered dinosaur , which makes it such a better film than those recent American remakes who resemble the olympics in 1980 Los Angeles …..when too much thrown at them