One of my earliest memories is being home sick from school, watching Mothra vs. Godzilla on VHS. I don’t know why my mom chose that particular movie to rent for me that day (RIP West Coast Video), but it kicked off a lifelong obsession with everybody’s favorite irradiated lizard and turned me into a kaiju apologist for life. 

I use the word “apologist” because, even though I love the Big G, I’m not blind to the inherent limitations of the genre. Though the original Godzilla is held up as a classic, many of its sequels and spinoffs are cheap and contrived, featuring actors in cheesy rubber suits performing wacky wrestling moves while a derivative, half-baked story about an alien invasion or corporate experiment gone wrong clogs up the rest of the runtime. In other words, these kinds of movies tend to be one long drive to the fireworks factory, and while I usually find the payoff worth it, I would never fault anyone for feeling otherwise. 

It was with this mindset that I went into Godzilla Minus One, the much-buzzed-about 37th entry in the franchise that also doubles as a 70th anniversary celebration of the original film. I was expecting to enjoy myself, but, still scarred by disappointments past, bracing for another fun, but not necessarily good, entry into the kaiju canon.

It turns out what I should have been bracing myself for was one of the best theatrical experiences I’ve had all year. Godzilla Minus One absolutely succeeds as a kaiju movie, featuring impressive VFX works on a small budget (a paltry $15 million; by comparison, the tepidly received Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania cost $200 million) and moments of homage and innovation for its title character. But it’s also the first Godzilla movie that seems to have cracked the code when it comes to its human characters, thanks to a plot that lets them interact with the titular titan in a way that feels personal and practical. There are no psychics or singing fairies in Godzilla Minus One – instead, it’s a movie about people shedding blood, sweat, and tears to rebuild their lives and their country, and the giant obstacle that stands in their way. 

Godzilla Minus One hits the ground running, literally, when kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) makes an emergency landing on Odo Island in the waning days of World War II. The reason for Shikishima’s landing is ostensibly so his plane can be repaired, but as head mechanic Tanchibana (Munetaka Aoki) quickly realizes, the plane is fine. Instead, Shikishima simply has no interest in committing suicide for his country, especially as they seem to be losing the war. Neither man has much time to contemplate this as later that night, the outpost is attacked by a pre-radiation Godzilla, who stomps on most of the crew and leaves Shikishima – who had the opportunity to shoot Godzilla but freezes up – and Tanchibana – who resents Shikishima for his apparent cowardice – the only two survivors. 

Fast forward a year and Shikishima finds himself in a post-firebombing Tokyo, where he befriends Noriko (Minami Hamabe), a young woman who’s informally adopted orphan Akiko (Sae Nagatani), and ends up as Shikishima’s kinda-roommate-kinda-love-interest. Desperate for work to support his makeshift family, Shikishima takes a job with a crew responsible for detonating submersible mines left over from the war. But after Operation Crossroads irradiates and awakens a sleeping Godzilla, Shikishima and his new colleagues find themselves in charge of holding the beast, which is making a beeline for Tokyo, at bay. 

It’s the first interaction between Shikishima’s crew and Godzilla that illustrates director Takashi Yamazaki’s original, kinetic vision for the well-worn character. In most Godzilla movies, human attempts to fight back against the monster require entire armies or giant mech suits. But Yamazaki chooses instead to keep things (relatively) small, staging a breakneck cat and mouse chase on the water between the otherwise lumbering behemoth and the minesweeper boat, which is trying to get Godzilla to swallow a mine so they can blow it up inside his head. The result is a thrilling, panicked duel between man and beast that Yamazki has admitted was inspired by Jaws, and one that adds a level of human stakes beyond giant buildings crumbling or people getting squished like bugs. 

Of course, once Godzilla does make his way towards Tokyo, there are plenty of excellent sequences where buildings crumble and people do get squished, including a recreation of the original’s iconic train scene. But while the 1954 Godzilla’s approach to these kinds of scenes was funereal and most of the later films’ sensational, Yamazaki instead chooses to treat them as downright traumatizing. We’re constantly reminded that this is a Japan that has not only survived both firebombs and the atomic bombings, but one that’s managed to rebuild after all of that destruction as well. Seeing Godzilla smash it all to bits, and top it all off by unleashing a heat ray that creates another nuclear explosion – doesn’t just create an existential threat. It also forces them to relive their own recent history, and make them wonder if this is just the hell that they live in now. This has all happened to the characters before – and for most of the film, all they can do is wonder when it will happen again. 

That feeling of helplessness, that there are forces beyond your control that you can only hope to react to, permeates throughout Godzilla Minus One. The government never warns the public about Godzilla’s imminent landfall because they don’t want to cause a panic; the United States won’t provide military support to Japan because they don’t want to provoke the Soviets; Shikishima can’t get a good night’s sleep because the ghosts of Godzilla’s first victims haunt him constantly. It’s only through uniting with a fleet of self-armed Navy veterans that Shikishima and company devise a plan to defeat Godzilla, setting the stage for a climax that evokes high-flying action films like Dunkirk and Top Gun: Maverick in their dynamism and scope. 

I feel like I haven’t described the Godzilla character enough in this review, but at the end of the day, this is a film about men – men who lost everything in a war and are fighting for the right to have a future. While the Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One is an effective stand-in for the horrors of war and the dangers of nuclear testing, Yamazaki has much more on his mind than sheer terror and mourning. He’s also trying to get at the root of what bravery is, and what it means to be redeemed, and how one can redefine their own history by trying to improve the present. Anyone can make a movie about Godzilla pounding buildings into rubble. But making an equally compelling story about the people crawling out of that rubble? That’s a much rarer feat.