
In some ways I will never not be scared of this creature
dir: Takashi Yamazaki
2023
And none too soon, finally, the sequel to Oppenheimer.
A joke already old and stale (in 2024), but I felt obligated to go with it anyway.
In a world where the contemporary American version of Godzilla is wary best buds with King Kong as they fight with all manner of giant monsters for the benefit, somehow, of humanity, the Japanese filmmakers, with their OG Godzilla, have chosen to go way back in time, back to the dark days just after the war.
Like they didn’t have enough to worry about…
See, this is a bit fascinating to me. For people who know a little bit about Japanese cinema, especially post-World War II, it’s interesting to see something set just after the war, because in Japan at that time, the Americans were in charge for a good long while. One of the prohibitions they had in place was that Japanese film studios couldn’t make any movies about the war or about just how horrible the reconstruction of the country was. They didn’t want to risk audiences getting riled up with propaganda pieces about how noble the Emperor was, how great his armies, and how unfair it was that the Americans annihilated so many of them.
So that’s one of the main reasons why almost every Japanese flick from the late 1940s – 1950s was generally a samurai era set period piece (chambera, I believe the genre was called).
And then there’s Godzilla from 1954, seventy goddamn years ago.
Everyone and his or her dog has an opinion on what Godzilla represents, but let’s just forestall any more bullshit theorising – obviously the Japanese mindset was horribly impacted by having two atom bombs dropped on two of their cities, killing hundreds of thousands, and then even more over time. Godzilla doesn’t exist, even as a fictional character, without American testing of nuclear bombs (in the original it was ‘hydrogen bombs’, just to please the censors).
Godzilla is the unforeseen legacy of the atomic age. But in this flick Godzilla is the personal nemesis of one guy who was too cowardly to fulfil his mission as a kamikaze pilot.
In the waning days of the war (the actual bombs at Nagasaki and Hiroshima are never mentioned), all kamikaze pilots are ordered to fly their planes into something American. One pilot, given the order, instead of thinking “how fucking ridiculous is this?” thinks “no, that sounds like it would hurt”, and flies to Odo island, where there is a repair facility, claiming there’s something wrong with his plane.
There’s nothing wrong with his plane, and the mechanics are like “how much of a fucking coward are you?” and he’s like “a bit”, but hold that thought because Godzilla attacks them.
The pilot I keep referring to has a name, being Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), but really, do names matter? He’s just the guilt-ridden, quivering coward who couldn’t kill himself for the glory of Japan in a futile yet suicidal gesture. And when Godzilla attacks this group of Japanese mechanics, Kōichi does nothing, and they all die, except for him and the head mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki).
Now, you and I know that Kōichi not flying his plane into someone or something could not have changed the outcome of the war, unless his mission had been to fly his plane into Robert Oppenheimer three years ago, in which case it might have made a difference. And we know, because this happens in the opening minutes of a two hour movie, that bullets don’t do shit to Godzilla, and so Kōichi wasn’t going to stop Godzilla anyway.
But Kōichi somehow doesn’t know that. Sent back to Tokyo with the other cowards, presumably, because apparently only cowards survived, the rest died for Emperor and country, he really wishes he’d died. Everyone he encounters also wish this. He sees one of the neighbours who lived next to his folks, who are also dead, and she’s like “if you had done your duty and died, my children would have somehow magically survived, you stinking coward”, and he sort of agrees with her. Most of this flick is Kōichi being convinced he should be dead. His guilt keeps summoning Godzilla, because Godzilla is the literal physical manifestation of his guilt.
No-one else seems to grasp this, but Godzilla specifically does things to fuck with Kōichi’s life, to remind him that he should be dead. He is so convinced of it that he occasionally wonders if he’s already dead, and that everyone around him is a ghost.
It does not stop him, somehow, from picking up hangers on. A woman with a baby sees him as a soft touch, and after she throws her baby at him when she’s caught shoplifting, and she sees that he can’t just abandon the baby girl, she knows this mark doesn’t have the balls to turf her out of his hovel.
They all live in hovels destroyed by the Americans firebombing everything. Their houses seem like they were built from cardboard anyway, and for the two years depicted in this flick, from 1945 to 1947, barely any of the rubble is cleared around them, and they have to keep on living in the remnants of what came before. Kōichi is ‘lucky’ enough to get work clearing sea mines, in an old wooden boat, which is a better deal than it sounds like. This work is high paying, and since there are no other jobs in the rubble, he takes it, all the better to keep the woman who’s latched onto him and the baby alive.
Kōichi questions the woman’s connection to the baby (there is none beyond circumstance), and his mean neighbour questions his connection to the woman and the child (there is none beyond circumstance). When people hear this, they immediately go “Then why would you help this person?”
Because. I will help them just because.
A large part of the argument of the flick (ignoring the giant atomic dinosaur) is about the painful journey from Japan’s pre-war imperial mentality (that everyone should die for the emperor, and just die in general), to a different kind of society where individual lives have worth in and of themselves, and where people do what they can for each other not out of shame or pride but out of a desire to rise up together from the ashes of the war.
On the one hand, I find this a bit rich, bit fucking self-serving, too. I don’t remember twisting Japan’s national elbow and forcing them into a war across Asia that killed millions and millions of people, not to mention all of the war crimes and such. This flick implies that the imperial mentality of the worthlessness of individual lives, or the culture of pride / suicide made all sorts of things worse and contributed to this, but it’s hardly an excuse or an explanation.
In a Japan that no longer has a military because of the… unpleasantness of the last twenty or so years, the ex-navy people are called upon to work together to try to defeat Godzilla. Not the Japanese government, not the American government, but the former military jerks who feel guilty about still being alive.
Like Kōichi. Like him, presumably, a whole bunch of other jerks also can’t let go of the war. Kōichi never considers hooking up with the woman living with him, despite Noriko’s clear interest (Minami Hamabe). And when the baby, grown up to a toddler, being Aiko keeps calling him dad he shuts her down, with “I told you before I’m not your dad.”
Haters are going to hate, in the immortal words of Taylorford Swifton, and jerks are going to jerk. The whole time throughout this flick Kōichi is a coiled, frantic maniac who just wants to die in order to stop feeling guilty. And even when it seems like he could get to a stage where he could build a new life with Noriko and Aiko, Godzilla has to come back to remind him he ain’t shit and he deserves nothing.
Whatever little you have can still be taken away from you, clear message in this flick. Even though everyone and everything has been pushing Kōichi towards a wider, more meaningful life, trapped as he is in the past, he can only orchestrate events such that he has to do what he was meant to do two years ago, and intentionally kill himself taking out Godzilla in order to have some peace.
It’s the only way.
In a flick from maybe sixty years ago, that would have been the way. I think this flick sticks the landing in saying “enough of all those Japanese films where everyone has to die just for the fuck of it.”
I mean, it doesn’t exactly help the tens of thousands of people in the Ginza district that Godzilla kills just to get back at him, but at least that taught Kōichi some kind of lesson about life and about valuing the people you’re with.
Even if all your ancestors are looking down at you with disgust.
I do have to take issue with the fact that instead of encouraging Our Hero to change his mind about his single-minded pursuit of a death he deems honourable to make up for his past cowardice, the flick essentially allows him to do everything he intends to do, and then tricks him at the end with something they lay the groundwork for, but it still made me groan out loud about when it happened. It’s a cop out, but maybe it’s not a cheap cop out.
The fact that it’s a period piece probably gives this flick a bit more seriousness than the flicks we’ve become used to / inured by. I think everyone does okay with what are very cliché kinds of characters, even within Godzilla flicks, but it did put more of a believable spin on things (in a flick where all the science is nonsense, of course). I kind of cared about what happened to the characters here, but that’s not necessarily a testament to the quality of the acting or the writing.
And much has been made about the special effects in a flick that was made for 10 per cent of what the American Godzilla flicks are made for, to much greater effect. I remember that the effects crew for this flick won an Academy Award earlier this year for their efforts, and it’s probably the first and last time a Godzilla flick will win such a prestigious and meaningful award. And yes, I was being sarcastic, why do you ask?
I think the impact of the effects works “better” when you care about what happens to the characters, and I kind of did, I think. I don’t need to see more sequels, however clearly they’re implied, but a man who tires of quality Godzilla movie is a man tired of life, and that is certainly not me.
As for the Big Guy / Big Girl? She’s all business in this one. She doesn’t fuck around, and she doesn’t like humans at all. But she has a particular hatred of the Japanese, which makes her at least a little bit racist. I have no doubt they’ll eventually go down the Godzilla Minus Versus Mothra etc route, because not every likes watching Godzilla movies where she’s the enemy of humanity, but I prefer it this way.
Maybe Godzilla could help against global warming by eating enough people, or maybe eating all the cows, maybe? That would definitely cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
7 times Greta Thunberg would approve this strategy out of 10
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“This country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That's why this time I'd take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.” - Godzilla Minus One
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