The Remarkable New Godzilla Movie That’s Tearing Up the U.S. Box Office

In the seven decades since Ishirō Honda’s 1954 classic Godzilla kicked off the durable genre of the kaiju (or giant monster) movie, this fearsome mega-reptile, a prehistoric creature summoned from the depths of the sea by atomic radiation, has stomped, chomped, and fire-breathed his way through 38 movies, not to mention countless comic books and video games. He has battled King Kong, a three-headed dragon, and a benevolent gargantuan moth, and he has even been known to fight alongside the human race against a common enemy. In writer-director Takashi Yamazaki’s remarkable Godzilla Minus One, the venerable behemoth returns to his roots, once again serving as an embodiment of Japan’s anxiety about nuclear weapons in the aftermath of World War II. But Yamazaki also brings something new to the Godzilla-verse: a more modern understanding of, and profound sensitivity to, human psychological states like post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt, as well as a critique of the nationalist machismo that shaped Japanese soldiers’ attitude toward their role in the war. It’s the rare kaiju movie that cares this deeply about the inner lives and motivations of the people scurrying out of the way of the monster’s ginormous thudding feet.

In 1945, Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a young kamikaze pilot, lands his plane on a small island devoted to military aircraft repairs. A mechanic (Munetaka Aoki) suspects that Koichi is only faking his plane’s technical problems so as to avoid flying an inevitably deadly mission. That night, the monster of the title emerges from the sea to wreak havoc on the island encampment, and everyone is killed except for the mechanic and Koichi, who, when called upon to unload his plane’s weapons on the beast, instead freezes in fear. Racked by shame and guilt, Koichi returns to his home in Tokyo, where his neighborhood has been reduced to rubble and both his parents killed.

Amid the wreckage, Koichi crosses paths with a young woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who has taken in a baby after the child’s mother died in an air raid. Though he initially resists the responsibility of taking them in, Koichi cannot bring himself to leave these two to their fate, and the three become a kind of ad hoc family as Tokyo begins the painful process of reconstruction.

Steven Spielberg has cited the original Godzilla as a major influence, and in Godzilla Minus One, Yamazaki returns the favor. After his return to Tokyo, Koichi takes a job on a mine-sweeping boat tasked with finding and blowing up the remaining ordnance in the sea off the Japanese coast. The small crew on this rust bucket—an old-salt captain, a brainy naval engineer, and a young sailor who wishes he too could have served in the war—can’t help but evoke the three-men-on-a-boat finale of Jaws. Soon after Koichi joins them, the boat’s crew encounters the colossus at sea, now mutated to be even more powerful thanks to the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll. In a jury-rigged operation that again recalls a certain shark movie, and that is staged with similar panache by Yamazaki, the boat’s crew devises a plan to make the creature swallow a mine, which they will then detonate in its mouth. It works, but to their horror, they realize that the leviathan has developed powers of self-regeneration. (Throughout the movie, but most especially in this first sea battle, the monster is rendered with a solidity that recalls the “suitmation” technique of early Godzilla films. Though he’s a CGI creation, his towering bulk and the craggy texture of his skin feel scarily palpable.) It’s only a matter of time before Godzilla has reached dry land, storming through the Tokyo neighborhood of Ginza while munching the cars of an elevated train as if they were a string of linked sausages.

Godzilla Minus One—the title comes from the notion that postwar Japan had been set back to zero, with the arrival of the beast pushing the counter into the negative—understands better than any movie I’ve seen in ages how to balance big action sequences with quiet character moments. For those used to American-style blockbusters, the lizard-free stretches may seem unusually extended. Between Koichi’s first encounter with the monster and his second, two full years go by, the passage of time indicated not by a quick on-screen legend but by a series of small-scale scenes between the human characters. Even if he had never laid eyes on an enormous prehistoric monster, Koichi would be contending with a powerful internal conflict: his deep guilt at having survived the war when so many he loved didn’t, which he regards not as a sign of resilience but of cowardice. Kamiki’s anguished, vulnerable performance is one crucial part of what makes this protagonist so memorable, but an equally important element is the sheer amount of time that Yamazaki’s script allows him to fret about things other than radioactive reptiles: how to earn a living in a war-ravaged economy, for example, or whether he is ready to accept the love that Noriko and their adopted daughter are so eager to give him.

In the five weeks since its U.S. release, Godzilla Minus One has crushed the box office under its mighty foot, not via the power of hype but through old-fashioned positive word of mouth. Made for a relatively modest budget of around $15 million—less than a tenth of the budget of the 2021 Hollywood installment Godzilla vs. Kong—it has become not only the most successful Godzilla film ever to come out of Japan but the highest-grossing live-action Japanese movie of all time. Lest the above-praised attention to character development and emotional nuance make it sound like an arty snooze, rest assured that Godzilla Minus One remains a rollicking action spectacle with a series of thrillingly crafted set pieces (several of which make judicious but clever use of Akira Ifukube’s original Godzilla theme, one of the most recognizable music cues in movie history). Come for the skyline-destroying radioactive dino, stay for the delicately etched portrait of recovery and self-forgiveness. Or vice versa. Just don’t miss the chance to remind yourself why the world fell for Godzilla in the first place.