Godzilla Minus One First Draft

Complete first draft for The Film Stage.

For much of Takashi Yamazaki's Godzilla Minus One, the 33rd Toho Studios film in the beloved kaiju franchise, the iconic monster exists as an abstraction. After a brief, brutal rampage at the beginning of the film, he is kept off-screen, a shadow in the mind of our hero Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki). To a certain extent, this entirely symbolic usage is nothing new: the deeply ingrained allegory for nuclear annihilation that Ishiro Honda's 1954 original presented has persisted, and often been adapted to fit the times: the most recent Japanese live-action predecessor, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's ferociously incisive Shin Godzilla, tackled the tangled bureaucracy ill-equipped to deal with the Fukushima disaster head-on. But Yamazaki moves back before the source: the prologue begins at the end of World War II, on an island mostly inhabited by plane technicians, where Koichi, a would-be kamikaze pilot, touches down after claiming to have technical issues. That night, a smaller but still fearsome incarnation of Godzilla attacks the encampment, and Koichi is frozen by fear, unable to pull the trigger on his plane turret, and the resulting devastation kills almost everybody else. After he returns to a firebombed Tokyo, he forms an ad hoc family with a homeless woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and an orphaned baby, then takes a job aboard a small minesweeper clearing the detritus of war. This humble existence is threatened when Godzilla, mutated and greatly enlarged by American nuclear testing, emerges once again. The weighting of information in the previous paragraph is intentional: Godzilla Minus One, despite its curious title, is effectively first and foremost a rather small-scale drama, spending much of its screentime with Koichi, his found family, and the motley minesweeper crew. Often located in the cramped interiors of Koichi's childhood home, it is locked into his mindset, doubly tormented by both the knowledge of his survival when so many others lived and his inability to take action, whether at the cost of his own life or not. Duty and honor as instilled by culture and society inevitably tie into this struggle, and it is given a potential, perverse outlet with the rise of a new enemy, as destructive as the conquerors who inadvertently reawakened it. The scenes of actual devastation are concentrated largely into sea battles (the first acts as a very tense Jaws homage) and a single land-based attack on the luxury district of Ginza, which does achieve the horrific level of carnage expected from any self-respecting monster movie. But these stand shoulder-to-shoulder with what emerges as a men-on-a-mission climax, an effort on the part of ex-Navy civilians, led by Koichi and his minesweeper crew, to kill Godzilla. Such shifts in scale—from grand calamity to intense revelations, from personal trauma to collective resolve—distinguish Godzilla Minus One. It is unabashedly sentimental, even risking a certain ideological simplicity in its groundswell of former troops fighting a new, potentially more worthy conflict on their own terms. But its journey towards its destination is hard-fought, willing to stay in the quiet anguish for uncomfortable lengths of time, so that the ultimate release is all the sweeter.