It’s the question I’ve been asking myself since Godzilla starring Matthew Broderick (and directed by the Independence Day guy) was released just over a quarter of a century ago: Why is it so god damn hard to make a decent Godzilla movie?
Not since Godzilla’s debut in the 1954 original from Japan’s Toho Studios has there been a single Godzilla movie that would bring anyone over the age of 12 the slightest amount of cheer or engagement. The 1954 version may have what we would now refer to as cheesy effects, but there’s a real story in the film, and the post WW2 nuclear paranoia that existed in Japan (the creature is awakened from the depths of the sea by an atom bomb test) was painfully relevant. The film was so successful that it was shown on this side of the ocean, in a terribly dubbed version, with new scenes inserted featuring the American actor Raymond Burr (best known for playing Perry Mason).
The success of the original film led to a succession of Godzilla movies, most of them sillier and hokier than their predecessors. But there was a certain charm to them–even when the filmmakers decided to make Godzilla, a massive dinosaur-like, heat ray breathing, seemingly conscience free force of destruction, a hero of sorts. While none of the films could touch the hem of Godzilla’s 1954 spiky scales, they were fun.
And then Godzilla 1985 happened in, well, 1985 (clever title, that). The film brought back Burr (who was never necessary), and was a cheaply made disaster that effectively killed Godzilla as a film entity as soon as it hit the theaters. Another thirteen years went by before we got the incredibly limp version with Broderick (not his fault, by the way). The 1998 version did make some money, but underwhelmed with both audiences and accountants.
But Godzilla is a bit like a vampire. You just can’t kill it (no wooden stake is getting through that scaly chest). But god knows, the versions of Godzilla that followed made me wish for the lizard’s permanent cinematic death.
Another sixteen years would pass before an American studio (more on that later) would produce another Godzilla film. Titled simply Godzilla, the film was intended to be the reboot of the nuclear powered water lizard that the 1998 version didn’t prove to be. Somehow, despite not being very good and not delivering explosive box office, the 2014 film was successful in getting Godzilla (who for some reason was designed to look a bit tubby) up from the undersea depths of franchises best left sunk. It’s a strange movie in some ways. There isn’t very much Godzilla in Godzilla 2014, and to put it mildly, the humans aren’t particularly interesting, but hey, the big fella did take out Las Vegas, and when you hate Sin City as much as I do, well, that’ll do, lizard. That’ll do.
Five years later Godzilla: King of the Monsters would follow. It’s a decidedly mediocre film that completely wastes an outstanding cast (Vera Farmiga, Kyle Chandler, Ken Watanabe, Millie Bobby Brown, Sally Hawkins, and David Straithairn, among others), but hey, I’m sure all the checks cleared and new property was purchased with greater ease. Honestly, I barely remember anything that happened in the film at all.
What I do know is its modest success led to the absolute nadir of all Godzilla films: Godzilla vs. Kong.
Words really can’t describe how terrible this movie is, but I’m going to try.
Again, is it really that hard to make a decent Godzilla or, for that matter, King Kong movie (a whole other subject)? Apparently so, because by 2021 we were up to four modern Godzilla films and all four are somewhere between aggressively mediocre and an incredibly painful sit. I suppose the mash up idea shouldn’t have given me any confidence that putting these two titans of fictitious beastliness together would result in anything other than a movie at least twice as bad as the other most recent (King of Monsters and 2017’s Kong: Skull Island) films featuring both beasts separately, but Jesus, is Godzilla vs. Kong a wretched viewing experience.
All anyone wanted from this movie is to see the big ape fight the big lizard. Did anyone need all this nonsense about a portal through the middle of the earth with cardboard cutout human beings leading the way through it for god knows what purpose? And about those human beings…Alexander Skaarsgard, Rebecca Hall, Millie Bobby Brown, Kyle Chandler, and Bryan Tyree Henry are all excellent actors who I’ve never seen give a truly bad performance…until now. All of them are so miserable that if you’d never seen them in anything else, you might ask, “can they act at all?”
And then finally, when you get to the big battle in Tokyo betwixt ‘Zilla and the ‘rilla, it’s completely deflating. Tokyo looks like a city full of huge neon video game buildings (in fact the whole movie looks like high-ish grade Sega Genesis). There’s no sense of the consequences of the massive destruction that occurs every time the two overgrown critters take out another skyscraper. There’s barely any shots of a crowd below. Every time they take out a building, that’s a 9/11 number of casualties, but in this dumb movie, no one bleeds and there is no collateral damage.
To make matters worse (I’d say spoiler alert, but this movie is already spoiled), Godzilla and Kong team up after completing their lizard-o y ape-o hostilities to take on, I shit thee not, what amounts to a Transformer Godzilla. If there’s one thing this hunk of junk didn’t need during its climax is to remind anyone of all those hunk of junk Michael Bay travesties of cinema.
Honestly, I was hoping the rotund lizard (why is Godzilla fat anyway? Is he eating all of the plastic in the ocean?) and the husky ape would team up to kill all the actors, to put them out of their misery.
And mine.
But just when all hope seemed to be lost, along came Godzilla Minus One from the character’s original source: Toho Studios.
Other better Godzilla movies were being made by Toho while Areican film studios companies were spending millions upon millions to faceplant directly on screen, but they were not being seen by American audiences. They simply couldn’t get distribution to the states. After all, the US based distributors Tri-Star and Legendary Pictures had to protect their investment, no matter our suffering.
On a 15 million dollar budget (for the entire film!), the Minus One VFX team created a genuinely terrifying creature whose backbone protrudes what looks like massive stalagmites, which when they turn blue, produce a powerful heat ray that explodes from Godzilla’s maw that is as beautiful as it is destructive. To put it succinctly, this is one great looking Godzilla. So good, that when I was in Los Angeles covering the Oscars for Awards Daily in the interview room adjacent to the Kodak Theater, the entire crowd erupted when the visual effects team won the Academy Award for best special effects. Godzilla Minus One did solid box office in the states for a monster film told entirely in Japanese, and it seems that everyone who saw it loved it–including critics.
I myself was late getting to the film. I was in Puerto Vallarta when it was showing theatrically and the tricky thing about seeing a Japanese film in Mexico is the subtitles are, as you would expect, in Spanish. Minus One also took an unusually long time to go from theatrical release to streaming (who knows what business machinations went on behind the scenes).
So, it wasn’t until just this weekend when the film debuted on Netflix, with next to no fanfare, that I was able to finally see Godzilla Minus One in all its glory. Toho and Director Takashi Yamazaki undo every mistake made by the American films for over a quarter of a century now. Every one of the American produced Godzilla films is bloated with excess, whether it’s too much winking humor, excessive special effects that—despite their cost—look cheap, a remarkable inability to make a good looking Godzilla, running times that make your backside ache, and humans that seem to serve no other purpose than “look, hey, monster, we should do something about that.”
Godzilla Minus One fixes all these errors and then some. I once heard a filmmaker (or maybe it was a critic—the mind fails) say that the key to a good action film is whether you’d still have a movie if you took all the action sequences out. While I’m no slave to this concept, I do think there’s something to it. And that’s where Godzilla Minus One succeeds by leaps and bounds over its American contemporaries.
If the film had been entirely about kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (an excellent Darren Barnet) who at the end of an unwinnable war feigned equipment trouble on his plane to avoid a certain and meaningless death, you’d have something already. Then add in his effort to rebuild his life in Japan while harboring feelings of great shame, and taking in a woman named Noriki (Minami Hamabe) in a very sympathetic performance) who is caring for an orphaned baby, well, that’s a pretty good Kurosawa plot.
Add in the threat of Godzilla, to the Japanese mainland, who creates an opportunity for Koichi to overcome his feelings of disgrace, and you actually have a well-balanced human / monster movie. Director and writer Takashi Yamazaki also avoids the common pitfall of making Godzilla a heroic figure of some sort. On any level, this never made any sense to me and nearly every American Godzilla film does it. Somehow, a creature unearthed from the deep by the foolishness of man, who takes to the land and destroys entire cities must somehow be redeemed by the end of the movie. Minus One is having none of that.
In fact, Minus One even goes so far as to include thoughtful post-World War 2 politics. Due to tensions between the US and Russia, Japan is left largely on its own to defend itself from Godzilla. They are left with four battleships and whatever ingenuity they have available to them to find a way to kill a creature who is impervious to gunfire due to a mutant-like self-healing ability. In short, they appear to be completely at the end of the shaft.
No fair giving away any more to those who haven’t seen it, but the man vs. monster climax is everything you would hope it would be. The battle is furious with ebbs and flows, and when the end to the face-off comes, it is more than satisfying. But the film doesn’t end there. No. Godzilla Minus One closes out with not only hope for Japan to avoid another attack by Godzilla (although ready yourself for a sequel), but also with a story or redemption, of a created family, and an opportunity to rebuild a decimated country and the souls that inhabit it.
Who the hell thought they would get all of that from a movie about a giant blue flame-breathing lizard rising from the ocean to wreak havoc at sea and on the land of a beaten and battered nation? Godzilla Minus One could have settled for being a great “Kaiju” movie, which it is. But it’s also much more than that. So very much more.
Godzilla Minus One is streaming now on Netflix. My advice? Don’t walk, run.
Reel Reframe 