‘Godzilla Minus One’ REVIEW: White Kaiju Art
‘Godzilla Minus One’ REVIEW: White Kaiju Art
Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One | Still courtesy of Toho Co.
In its 37th outing, the once and future kaiju Godzilla finds itself staid. It may stand just as tall, yes, and its roar is, in fact, the exact same (taken lovingly from the original audio track), yet this Godzilla is neither foul nor frightful so much as desiccated and hollowed-out. ‘Godzilla Minus One’ is the 21st film of its writer-director, Takashi Yamazaki, and here he substitutes Godzilla’s — and, correspondingly, man’s — familiar savagery for the even more common cliché.
At the film’s opening, we are set upon the shores of Odo Island, a military base right off the Japanese coast, at the tailend of the Second World War. Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), kamikaze pilot of the 601st, has just landed there. As Shikishima steps off, seemingly dejected, he informs the mechanic of the base, Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), that his plane had been experiencing some kind of malfunction, though both men, while they do not say it to the other, know that the former had simply lost his spirit. Shikishima is left alone to sit silently by the sea.
Later that night, Godzilla rises out of the water. This one scene alone, intimating Godzilla’s presence as a Tritonic act of reprisal (in this case, for purported cowardice), prefigures the rest of the film. What follows is one of those plucky morality plays dealing with both the physical and the psychological: the latter coming as a result of the former, though, at the same time, the former existing, in perfectly aligned counterpoint, to allegorize the latter.
At its best, these cinematographic spiels possess a genuine capacity towards some level of poignancy and grace. In Lumet’s Fail Safe, also about the bomb, the sociopolitical catharsis is at least made piquant, blazing with wit and vigor. Henry Fonda has such frisson — and the camera is sometimes held onto him so tightly — that his feeling inevitably transfers over to you; as lone figures being held in thrall.
Even in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, admittedly more satiric than didactic, the characters retain some semblance of humanity; half-wit, yes, but not half-soul. At its worst, however, as in, say, Lumet’s Network, any psychological nuance is blitheringly stripped away, and the audience is left sagging and needlessly sullen. Nobody wants to exist in a ouroboros of suffering, and here the spare hope that Yamazaki does provide is speciously numbing rather than truly cathartic.
On his return, whereupon he is treated as a traitor, Shikishima is unwittingly thrown together with an unknown, vagrant woman, named Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who carries in her arms a baby that isn’t quite hers. For a while, they play at being a family, with Shikishima equivocating on the subject without ever committing to it fully. Noriko exists squarely within the idolatric tradition: emotionally lithe, more buoy than being. The little tyke, too, is cutesy in a way that’s kiddy-kitsch, an obvious emotive lever that Yamazaki will come to use intermittently. Whenever a person ostensibly dies, for example, the young child will amble into the room to ask where they are, as if on cue, only so that they may cry in the corner when told the bad news.
Shikishima later gets a job aboard a rinky-dink fishing vessel, converted in the aftermath of the war to scour the ocean floors for leftover naval mines. Noriko, meanwhile, begins work in Ginza, one of Tokyo’s premier commercial districts, situated by the coast. The Tokyo of 1947, only two years after the war, is sleek and vibrant, with a cosmopolitan vitality that could only ever materialize post-war. The men and women are ever abustle: they go to work on trams and trains, dressed in the Western fashion of the day, overcoated suits and downy dresses. John Dower, in his 1999 book “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II,” would later write on the country’s economic recovery, on its dependence on the American defense industry, brought on by the incoming Cold War:
“These were heady developments after so many years of economic stagnation, but many high-level economic planners nonetheless viewed the war boom as a decidedly mixed blessing. They were appalled by the prospect of again becoming involved in an economy dependent on military demands; and they warned that the boom threatened to exacerbate economic “dualism” by benefiting primarily larger, more modern enterprises. The 1953 Economic White Paper published by the new Economic Planning Agency went so far as to refer to the “sin of special procurements.”
At the same time, the widespread positive effects of the boom were undeniable. Many small and medium-size enterprises did prosper. Real wages in manufacturing industries increased significantly. By 1952, ordinary people were beginning to experience what the White Paper called a “consumer boom.” Food consumption regained prewar levels, and inexpensive clothing became widely available. Basic household amenities such as refrigerators and sewing machines were more accessible, as were such luxury items as radios and cameras. Personal savings rose, which in turn increased the funds available for industrial investment.
This was a new world indeed.
All the more tragic then that this glossy penance, under American purview, should be so violently cast down by a big dinosaur.
Kuranosuke Sasaki as Seiji Akitsu | Still courtesy of Toho Co.
Godzilla was born in an act of atomic epiclesis, with the A-bomb as its anlage, out of the American nuke tests of Operation Crossroads, held at Bikini Atoll just after the war. Like many of its numinous precursors, the monster has always served, since its initial iteration in 1954, as a kind of contrapasso incarnate. The approach is decidedly apocalyptic, though localized on a minor, more national scale, with the modern Nipponese man and his made environs razed to rubble.
Godzilla kills both indiscriminately and dispassionately — the demimondes and dignitaries alike, man, woman, or child, contrite or otherwise — as it operates on a pitiless sort of programming, one that is both pure and singular. “And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them.” recounts the Book of Revelation. “And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.”
The hedonism of Sodom and Egypt here has, of course, been replaced with Japanese imperial militancy, with the brutality of its colonial expansionism now directed inland. Yet Godzilla’s destruction of Ginza, shown in a scene of general carnage, is conspicuously devoid of somatic specificity. In these disparate images of violence, Yamazaki plays it confoundingly safe; he has somehow made mass murder benign. Thronging the streets to be slaughtered, the crowd fleeing Godzilla do not have the stuff of blood and bones. One hardly needs guts or gore to get the point across, but when it’s all over, you can hardly tell if there’s even a single body.
One of the few interesting scenes in the film sees a film crew, presumably journalists, filming the mayhem atop a large building. The reporter’s monologue mythologizes Godzilla in the grandest of terms, narrativizing the events in real time:
“What we’re witnessing is a scene beyond belief. We can only watch as the massive creature destroys our city! Each step it takes, Ginza is crushed in its path. And now it’s begun tearing apart the Nippon Theater! The theater, once a beloved icon of the people, razed in mere moments. All of this, right before our very eyes! It’s truly unbelievable. The district that survived catastrophic air raids during the war has been reduced to little more than rubble. And now the monster! It’s approaching our position! As it moves closer, we can only stand back and watch as its enormous head towers above us!”
Godzilla does not take notice of the crew, but as it walks past, its right knee scrapes the base of the building, causing it to collapse. The group begins to slide off the crumbling rooftop, yet the reporter continues his monologue for a few moments more, maintaining the same orotund tone:
“This could be the end! It isn’t safe for us to be here!” But then the words give way to helpless, frantic screaming, and then there they are falling, falling, falling to their presumable deaths, and then as this moment is just about to occur…Yamazaki cuts before impact.
Inadvertently or not, the director seems to suggest, antithetical to his own themes, that the destruction of these endless bodies — along with it the stringing along of the singular soul — is a narrative end in itself, as nameless fodder to be observed both gleefully and pityingly; yet we are somehow also contradictorily expected to view and venerate these narrative ends, at least the important ones, as warm-blooded human beings in their own respect.
As potent of a scene as it may be, Yamazaki also unwittingly begs the question. Why do these journalists, despite the self-evident danger, continue to film Godzilla? Is it out of a sense of duty, a fidelity to the nation? If so, is this loyalty a newfound belief in liberal idealism or is it instead undiluted nationalism? What about mere thrill? The thrall of theophany? The possibilities are perhaps endless, except Yamazaki clearly isn’t interested in extending these possibilities out, to see where they may potentially lead.
In the aftermath of the Ginza incident, Shikishima is made privy to a surreptitious plan, conceived primarily by a member of his minesweeping crew. This member is Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a former Navy scientist and thereby the ‘smart’ member of the crew, whose nickname, correspondingly, is, in fact, ‘Doc.’ The rest of the company is filled out with a series of stock characters.
There is Mizushima (Yuki Yamada), the apprentice of the crew, and correspondingly his nickname is, in fact, ‘Kid.’ He is supposedly the sanguine one, unsullied by war, yet it may be more apt to consider him politically blithe, as he often extols naively the virtues of direct, confrontational force and the misty romance of war. “I didn’t get a chance to serve in the war like you…” he says to Shikishima, sulking. “If I’d fought in the war, I know I’d have been useful too. Ah, if only it had just kept on going…”
Yamada’s character, along with his gee-whiz bellicist tendencies, are, in turn, playfully chided by his superior and principal foil: the gruff and wry Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki). (A bit of a boor, he also supplies the aforementioned nicknames.) His chidings (“Damn you kid!” “This kid!”) are left just that, plain teasings, and are delivered only by rote. The trio are as much narrative fulcrum and lever as the toddler is, emotionally distended; with as much psychological vacuity as Noriko or the rest of the great Ginzan mass.
Ryunosuke Kamiki (left) and Minami Hamabe (right) as Koichi Shikishima and Noriko Oishi, respectively | Still courtesy of Toho Co.
Apocalypse stories often predicate themselves upon some type of millenarianism. The present state of things is to be upended, such that humanity and his society are, ipso facto, irrevocably altered. This metamorphosis may be directly imposed, it may well be from within. It may be supernatural, it may be synthetic. It may be contextualized as a form of redemption or reprobation, depending on your own disposition, but it certainly cannot be both. Nevertheless, Yamazaki tries to make it so.
The crew is just one of the many remnants of the former Imperial military. All together they are the leftovers of the war, the perpetrators of what amounts to a collective mortal sin. How does one atone for this? Captain Tatsuo, one of the leaders of the plot, explains the situation quite tidily:
“No one is coming to help us. In short, the only option is to confront this monster, uniting our strengths as private citizens. […] We’re in this alone. No aid from any government. Which means the future of this nation is in your hands again.”
In response, one feckless soldier groans, “Why does it have to be us? We’re always the ones drawing the short straw.” Another listless man adds, “We can’t go back to the things we were doing in the war.” At this point, a few men leave, but most stay. A brave man then says, “Someone has to do this, right? Who else is gonna get this done?” to Captain Tatsuo’s visible assent.
Now this is all well and fine, slapdash derring-do, but at no point does Yamazaki ask a glaringly obvious question — is it even possible to atone? He takes it for granted that the answer is yes, and so he takes it for granted that we are on his side. The plan itself is a recontextualization of Imperial Japan. Nothing is really upended, everything is in fact the same, except it is now directed towards putatively “right” reasons. As Akitsu says, “In the war, we were used to suffering every day. But now, we get to do good again.” The emphasis here is tellingly placed on their own suffering, and its consequent precluding of “good.”
And now for another ignored question: what does good even look like? Jingoism has ruined Japan materially, but now liberalism too has left it spiritually bereft. The liberal satellite state has, in effect, like Shikishima himself, abandoned their post, and so it is now the apparent responsibility of the forsaken martial class — a fraternal order cloistered from the rest of society — to shoulder society’s burden for them, once again. In its grossest affectations, the tendentious myth plays in a childishly tumescent manner. It is sappy, pious, and overbearingly oppressive; a little boy and a middle-aged man’s mutual fantasy.
Even as a spectacle, there is no real danger, and therefore no real thrill. There are no straggling moments of fear. Of course, you know everything is going to turn out alright, but somehow, you leave incredulous when things turn out even better than you could have possibly imagined. Those who should die don’t, and those who do die still don’t. Death has always been somewhat impermanent in the movies, but very rarely has death as a narrative shackle been so easily cast-off, the same way a child throws away a toy he doesn’t need anymore because he apparently found something “better.”
This is all for the short-sighted sake of cathartic expediency, except honest catharsis is something that should be allowed to settle in your skin; it isn’t something splashed on you suddenly like a cold bucket of water. I have seen a few spurious comparisons to Spielberg, but the suggestion comes off as rather strange. At the end of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg’s arguable masterpiece, the child-robot David finally finds his magical Blue Fairy, the one who he believes will turn him into a real boy.
In this disconsolate moment, the film is pitched perfectly, as Spielberg makes it plain: the Blue Fairy is a porcelain statue, magic is not real, and David will never become a real boy. To which director Yamazaki responds in his own film — well, why not? The Japanese soldiers, scarred by the incomprehensibility of real war, have receded back into the safe and simplistic comforts of pretend, all the while Godzilla remains merely there, an inexorable yet ineffectual catalyst lumbering in leaden lockstep with its exasperatingly inert reactant. It’s an awfully bad case of cinematic thrombosis.
