Godzilla Minus One (2023)

 I have a suspision that the title 'Godzilla Minus One' loses something in the translation, but what it intends to convey is that this is a Godzilla movie set before the 1953 original; not that we should take any kind of continuity with that or other Godzilla movies to be implied, this is a reboot.

Ryunosuke Kamiki is a fighter pilot in the waining days of the Second World War, he first encounters Godzilla on a small Japanese island, he freezes up, fails to act and as a result only he and one of his companions survive the attack. When rescue finally arrives they assume the Americans are responsible for the devastation, the two survivors opt not to correct them. 

Shortly after the war ends, Ryunosuke returns home in disgrace to a largely ruined Tokyo, he finds that all his family has died in the firebombings. He takes in Minami Hamabe, a young woman similarly devoid of kin and the baby girl she rescued from a dying mother's arms. The three orphans gradually become a kind of family. 

Ryunosuke takes work detonating discarded mines left in Japanse waters, two years pass. Godzilla, now mutated from American nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll, re-emerges, attacks shipping and heads for Tokyo. When the monster arrives those scenes look great on an IMAX screen. 

The movie plays things rather straight, it consciously avoids camp though occasionally veers into melodrama. It makes clear early on that it is to be an extended rumination on survivors guilt, but it's more then that. The filmmakers use Godzilla as a means of exploring the ambivalent feelings of the Japanese people to the then recently concluded war. It uses the giant lizard monster as a kind of catharsis, giving its many emotionally wounded characters an unambiguous evil to fight and save their homeland from. In doing this it's kind of beautiful, Godzilla meets Dunkirk. 

The movie pulls its unusual blend off admirably, what few things I might have tweaked in it don't matter much. American Godzilla movies, even the good one, don't seem to have much to say, it's a Japanese monster best suited to a Japanese psyche, about which it has alot to tell us. ***1/2