Warning: objects in reflection may be scarier than they appear.

In 2019 writer/director Takashi Yamazaki’s historical-fictional The Great War of Archimedes voiced a younger generation’s righteous anger at the hawkish military statesmen who may have deceitfully goaded Japan into World War II and examined the question, “What if one lone hero had risen up to expose their lies and tried to avert the war? Also, what if he were a math whiz?” After their country’s resignation from the League of Nations, officials who oppose elder colleagues’ proposal to build the ultimate super-battleship — clearly the herald of a forthcoming offensive rather than an ostentatious precautionary defense — recruit an antiwar savant to prove the mega-boat would be wildly more expensive than they’re letting on and hopefully foil their plot. The filmmaker best sums up the hubris of those would-be conquerors in a chilling boardroom debate where one contemptuous admiral dismisses the will of the people that is so beneath him: “Without the state, the people are nothing.”

Currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime and some ad-supported services, Yamazaki’s fast-paced high-stakes calculus melodrama expresses regret over the arrogant leadership of yore and proves their audiences are far more open-minded to supporting niche sub-subgenres than Americans are. But it’s especially striking for its opening set piece, a flash-forward to the final fate of the Yamato — a harrowing, five-minute ocean-disaster modern-CG epic mash-up of Titanic and Pearl Harbor bloodier than both films combined. Viewers will know The End going in, yet watch in escalating horror how some dissenting officers might’ve foreseen that outcome but played along anyway.

Four years later Yamazaki’s American theatrical debut follows the same train of recriminating thought as he shifts focus from pre- to post-war Japan. Amid the remains of its decimated cities — not just the two commemorated in all “NEVER AGAIN” speeches and essays ever since — he reemphasizes the past sins of the ruling class and celebrates the indomitable spirit of the Japanese people who rise up to defend their homeland against a flagrantly aggressive common foe. They band together not with their government but despite their government. As it happens, that foe is a famous giant lizard.

The heart of Godzilla Minus One is an unlikely hero named Shikishima who was terrible at his one job as a kamikaze pilot, as evidenced by his survival. Ryunosuke Kamiki, a veteran voice actor (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Your Name) goes anxiously full-on chicken in refusing to offer himself up as a pointless sacrifice — not because of principled pacifist defiance, but because he really, really doesn’t want to die. That dishonor haunts him not only in the days and years after Japan’s eventual concession to the allies, but through the pre-surrender opening sequence, when he takes refuge at an island repair station only to watch as a ferocious green T-Rex storms the place and shreds everyone in sight…except him. The beast ignores him as he cowers in the safety of his cockpit, its machine guns armed and primed yet untouched. As a civilian at a safe remove, I don’t blame him — Yamazaki stages the nighttime proto-‘Zilla slaughter in maximum Jurassic Park horrific style.

Once he’s back in his old Tokyo neighborhood, he hunkers down in the remains of his house with a pair of strangers, each the sole survivors of their own respective families: a young lady named Noriko (Minami Hamabe, also the highest-billed actress in Archimedes) and an unrelated preschooler named Akiko (li’l Sae Nagatani, sufficiently calm or crying on cue). Over the next few years Shikishima grows into the head-of-household role in this found-family trio of orphans and tries to care about something other than his own hide…though not romantically care. He and Noriko start on the wrong foot and stay that way for a good while. But he finds a steady job, and a longtime neighbor offers to watch Akiko so Noriko can also return to the workforce, possibly so she can earn enough money to move out on her own and stop bothering the young, bitter veteran.

Then comes the fateful moment every Godzilla fan knows: the infamous, real-life Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb tests that catalyze its secret origin, like Peter Parker’s radioactive spider-bite or Joe Chill yanking Martha Wayne’s pearls. We know what’s coming next even if Our Cowardly Hero doesn’t. In the classic ’54 Godzilla, the poor nuked dinosaur took years to mutate, embiggen and begin wreaking havoc. To Shikishima’s imminent deep regret, Yamazaki retcons the timeline and inserts Godzilla Minus One between Bikini Atoll and the rest of Ishirō Honda’s original narrative, as if Movie Scientists recently determined a sufficiently powerful nuclear payload surely wouldn’t take seven long years to achieve its ultimate form.

Soon come all the EXPLOSIONS the audience has paid to see — first an intense ocean chase that dwarfs all the Jaws sequels combined, followed by Mainland Japan’s very first kaiju incursion, in the heavily populated district of Ginza. In reality the area did enjoy a massive postwar rebuilding boom; in the film’s timeline, the reconstruction era raised more than enough skyscrapers for super awesome blockbuster carnage. As with 2016’s Shin Godzilla, in the modern era ye olde rubber suits are out and CG is in, opening up entire new dashboards of options for VFX artists who can illustrate Our Monster’s devastation more frighteningly hyper-realistically than ever. This is not the endearing, teachable Godzilla who tag-team-wrestles other irradiated colossi. (Apropos of ’54, it’s the only character over ten feet tall.) The ensuing Ginza tragedy is very much an anti-nuke, post-9/11 doomsday hypothesis of the potential body count of countless building collapses, tail-whips, multi-ton footfalls and backhands from an uncaring leviathan. It is bombastic and scary.

Yamazaki and his Archimedes cinematographer Kōzō Shibasaki fix the camera’s gaze and refuse to let us turn away from the wreckage (unlike the far more fragile in-movie cameramen in jeopardy) as structure after structure falls, life signs are visibly snuffed out en masse, and Godzilla’s trademark Finishing Move (you know the one) caps off his rampage with a mondo-giganto EXPLOSION-TO-END-ALL-EXPLOSIONS larger, louder, and scarier than Oppenheimer‘s based-on-a-true-EXPLOSION showpiece, and drowning out the sound of old-fashioned kaiju fans’ jaws hitting the floor. Incredibly, there are survivors — including of course Shikishima, whose life-of-Job hapless existence remains futile and useless…or is he?

As with every G-flick ever, naturally someone has to come up with an audacious plan to save the day and defeat this shambling, scaly, toothy, glowering face of nature-vs.-man nihilism. Once again the crux of The Plan is not escalated brute force, but mad science. Courtesy of Shikishima’s brilliant engineer coworker Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) the steps are arguably more complicated yet less ludicrously unrealistic than the ’54 Oxygen Destroyer. Yamazaki omits Archimedes‘ lectures of differentials and coefficients, instead keeping Kenji’s exposition on a level pretty easily comprehensible for anyone who’s seen enough movies set in oceans. Somehow it all makes sense, even if it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi, as most movie plans do, until Our Hero steps up with one last contribution that might be just crazy enough to work. But will it work? Will Shikishima also find redemption for his shame? Will his found family come through it all intact? Can Godzilla be decisively defeated while leaving an escape clause to avoid overriding the ’54 canon? Also, can it look really, really cool?

It’s no spoiler to admit that not all those easy questions will be answered “nope”. There is a formula to maintain…and yet Yamazaki devises his own space for variance among the monster-movie equations. Shikishima, Kenji and their other coworkers don’t have to go it alone. In the face of what could be another soul-crushing defeat for their already beleaguered nation, they inspire a resistance movement of their own — hundreds of Navy men who survived the war, all of whom are ticked that they were called to such questionable action in the first place. The government they obeyed — the same body that pounded the war drums and issued suicidal orders for their own glory/benefit in what proved a long exercise in futility (which, again, Archimedes posited they knew in advance) — refuses to alert Ginza before the King of Monsters arrives, flattens it, and kills tens of thousands of citizens. The Powers That Be are concerned fomenting such an unseemly panic would cause too much “mayhem and chaos”, and of course they must appear stoic and unflappable to other nations at all times, right?

(In an interesting sidebar, as if to answer the fan question of “Why don’t any other countries come and help?”, we learn U.S. officials extend their regrets that they can’t be there due to Soviet troop activities in the region. They fear any such interactions could spark a different kind of catastrophe. The day will not be saved by Raymond Burr’s dad.)

So all these vets, now proud private citizens, are forsaken by their government and unite to do the job themselves. Instead of the usual man-vs.-nature war-sucks themes of ye olden films, Godzilla becomes a symbol of Japan’s ravaging that its leaders’ hubris brought upon themselves. The people unite for a greater purpose despite their awful leaders — to defend life, liberty, and land (well, the rubble that’s left of it) against an enemy from without. Yamazaki shapes Godzilla into a new metaphor — not just as an antiwar boogeylizard or as a toy-line IP, but as a lumbering, super-sized scapegoat on which the nationwide survivors’ collective can come together, vent their rage, make a positive difference in something, and move on to a new era in which their descendants will be free to grow up and dominate the world’s tech sectors.

Walking in, I hadn’t seen a Japanese-made Godzilla film since Godzilla 2000, which our family saw at a sparsely attended showing where we could safely quip MST-style as we watched. Even my 5-year-old son was poking at it, but it was still, y’know, popcorn-fun. Despite the 2,001-point difference in their titles, Godzilla Minus One does have a few moments of grief-stricken melodrama that maybe could’ve been a shade reined-in, but those are a minority among so many other, more nuanced interactions and overarching commentary…not to mention the happy fringe benefit of how they get to look really, really cool doing it. In particular, from our volume-16 seats in an AMC Dolby Cinema’s Row G (apropos!), the final boss battle’s masterstroke is an unforgettable stunner worth all the build-up.

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Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Sakura Ando (the outraged mom from Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster and Shoplifters) is Our Hero’s neighbor, bearer of bad postwar tidings and Akiko’s daytime babysitter.

Yuki Yamada (also of Shoplifters) is another of Shikishima’s coworkers, a youngster who wishes he’d been old enough to serve in WWII. His associates scold his naivete and all but swat him with their hats in disgust like the Skipper smacking Gilligan around.

Munetaka Aoki, star of the live-action Rurouni Kenshin films, is a prominent soldier in the prologue set on Odo Island, but isn’t totally forgotten later.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Godzilla Minus One end credits per se, but if you stick around through all the kanji and a smattering of English proper nouns (Square Enix, the Final Fantasy people, headline one section), the final moments are accompanied by slow, thunderous footsteps, followed by that spine-shivering trademark roar, which we all recognize is Monsterese for “GODZILLA WILL RETURN.”