Godzilla turns 70 next year, and to celebrate, his parent company Toho Studios waited until the end of this year to release the most conventional Godzilla movie in recent memory. \u201cGodzilla Minus One\u201d may also be the most sobering and least flamboyant Japanese-produced Godzilla movie since the original 1954 nuclear lizard disaster pic (though \u201cGodzilla 1985\u201d fans might disagree). Some reviews of \u201cGodzilla Minus One\u201d have already praised the movie as an escapist crowd-pleaser. It\u2019s easy to see why, given the bleak but well-calibrated tone of its human-centric scenes.<\/p>\n
Set in 1946, \u201cGodzilla Minus One\u201d follows a spiritually depleted group of ex-military men as they rally to vanquish everyone\u2019s favorite kaiju<\/em> antihero. Here, Godzilla\u2019s presence is a given, as it probably should be after dozens of movies and spinoff projects. If traumatized survivors like disgraced kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) can\u2019t stop Godzilla, he will destroy Ginza and then stomp all over Tokyo. <\/p>\n Koichi is motivated by survivor\u2019s guilt. In an establishing scene on Odo Island, Koichi takes aim at Godzilla but can\u2019t bring himself to shoot. As a result, several fellow army men die, leaving Koichi to bury their bodies. Reviving Koichi\u2019s ultimately patriotic mojo takes priority since that sort of nationalistic passion is apparently essential to fighting Godzilla. At the same time, Koichi\u2019s loved ones are still very dead, so now he has to take care of other survivors, most of whom have also lost their loved ones, their homes, and their will to fight. That last part is crucial, but overcoming spiritual decline is also a big part of Koichi and therefore, Big G\u2019s story in \u201cGodzilla Minus One.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cI would like to try to live again,\u201d Koichi says with square-jawed sincerity. His intense need to prove himself is paralleled but never matched by fellow cast-offs like Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a bookish ex-weapons engineer, and Sosaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), an ex-Navy mechanic. These guys only hint at their inner demons; they often literally wear their trauma on their sleeves since the ash and grime of post-war recovery have already overtaken them. Some female protagonists, like Koichi\u2019s selfless sweetie Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe) and his newly-orphaned adopted daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani), also give him more reasons to fight, though their agency and personalities are even more limited than Koichi\u2019s male co-stars. <\/p>\n Godzilla\u2019s also in \u201cGodzilla Minus One,\u201d by the way, and he\u2019s treated with apparent reverence. \u201cGodzilla Minus One\u201d is a well-calibrated popcorn movie, and you can hear it in the way that its creators play up fan favorite devices and associations. It\u2019s an event when he roars or deploys his fire breath for the first time in this movie. Godzilla fans will probably also feel appropriately flattered by the strategic use of a few song cues from Akira Ifukube\u2019s now iconic \u201cGojira\u201d score. <\/p>\n Ifukube\u2019s music is worked in seamlessly without sounding much like new music by \u201cGodzilla Minus One\u201d composer Naoki Sato, who lays down a droning orchestral wall of sound that his string section flits across like a surfer riding a towering and perpetually cresting wave. It\u2019s one of the most rousing and nerve-wracking original scores in a recent Godzilla movie. Tactically deployed silences and mood-setting background noises also punctuate and goose the already overwhelming on-screen action. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Godzilla turns 70 next year, and to celebrate, his parent company Toho Studios waited until the end of this year to release the most conventional Godzilla movie in recent memory. \u201cGodzilla Minus One\u201d may also be the most sobering and least flamboyant Japanese-produced Godzilla movie since the original 1954 nuclear lizard disaster pic (though \u201cGodzilla …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,45,51],"class_list":["post-1246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-drama","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}