IN THE DARK REVIEWS

Too many of my fellow critics of cinema have a long and unfortunate history of refusing to acknowledge the artistic validity of any number of specific genres of film, until they're forced to do so by an emerging popular consensus that proves so broad and strong that it threatens to render their perspectives culturally irrelevant.

Once upon a time, gangster flicks were considered as soulless and formulaic, as fine folks such as Martin Scorsese have deemed the majority of modern onscreen superhero stories to be. But after "The Godfather" won Best Picture at the 1973 Academy Awards, any reviewer who would turn up their nose at mobster movies could safely be condemned as a myopic elitist today.

Likewise, while most film historians will at least grant that the original 1954 "Godzilla" - and even its Americanized 1956 re-release, "Godzilla, King of the Monsters" - qualifies as "culturally significant," the stubborn consensus has largely remained that the "kaiju" ("strange beast," translated from Japanese) genre lacks artistic value.

This decades-ingrained prejudice has begun to erode. Bong Joon-ho earned commercial success and critical acclaim with "The Host" in 2006, years before releasing "Snowpiercer" in 2013 and "Parasite" in 2019.

Toho, the Japanese movie studio that gave birth to Godzilla, kicked off a new era in the character's history by releasing "Shin Godzilla" in 2016.

"Shin Godzilla" depicted Godzilla's origins as taking place in the "present day," but also delved into a virtually surgical level of detail about how the Japanese government might respond to what would essentially amount to a walking natural disaster.

"Shin Godzilla" and the "MonsterVerse," the latter produced by Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures with Toho's permission, convey the scope of these gigantic creatures' savage combat, with the whole of civilization potentially on the table as their collateral damage.

And for the absurdly low total budget of $15 million - less than the per-episode budget for several popular Netflix streaming shows - "Godzilla Minus One" has equaled "Shin Godzilla" and the "MonsterVerse" in visually immersive technical craftsmanship and has done so with a narrative that even the most snobbish of critics would acknowledge as Oscar-caliber - if it didn't also star Godzilla.

The human story of "Godzilla Minus One" follows a failed kamikaze pilot, from the final days of World War II to just a few years afterward when neighborhoods in Japan, demolished by air raids, saw it as significant progress that they'd been able to tidy up the rubble that surrounded their ramshackle, half-rebuilt houses.

The end of the world war marks the start of a personal war for our pilot, who is ridiculed for his perceived cowardness. Godzilla attacks the island aircraft landing strip where he's touched down, wiping out his fellow Japanese military members. He freezes with fear rather than turning his aircraft's guns on Godzilla.

Over the decades of his onscreen existence, Godzilla has become a personification for countless human traumas and misdeeds, representing the consequences of everything from nuclear warfare to the environmental toll of industrial pollution. But in "Godzilla Minus One," he's the living specter of the survivor's guilt felt by far too many war veterans.

As this story's shame-faced war veteran returns to civilian life, he acquires a surrogate family, taking in a woman his own age, who has nowhere else to go, after she herself adopted an orphaned little girl. While our veteran turns to hazardous tasks such as minesweeping to support this woman and her girl, he never marries the woman, nor does he allow the girl to refer to him as her father.

It's not until Godzilla resurfaces that our veteran finally shares with the woman how he'd previously encountered the creature, as well as how he'd failed to save his brothers-in-arms from the beast, because like too many veterans, his war never stopped inside of his head. His inability to share his painful story has built a wall between him and those who would otherwise be closest to him.

Although I'm technically a war veteran (deployed as part of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom), I always hesitate to compare my own experiences on board ship to those who saw on-the-ground combat, but just about any veteran is bound to be haunted, however slightly, by some aspect of their service, and it can be tough to communicate what those moments meant, and still mean, to those who weren't there.

Of course, it's not long before the rest of Japan starts experiencing the sheer devastation that Godzilla is capable of wreaking, with one sequence, set in the upscale Tokyo district of Ginza, hammering home how profoundly destructive even the least of the big lizard's actions would be, with his sweeping tail alone effortlessly wiping out infrastructure left and right, which we as the viewers get to witness from the street spectator level.

And yet, for as harrowing as this film is, it commits to a surprisingly humane moral message, as one Japanese ex-military scientist leads a civilian campaign against Godzilla by criticizing his country's tendency to lionize the supposed honor of self-sacrifice, and other characters embrace the view that building a better future requires that people choose to live, to care for their children and improve the world that they'll grow up in.

Couple this with another war veteran expressing the sentiment that it's a noble thing to have NOT served in war, and "Godzilla Minus One" makes a statement that arguably qualifies as radical, for both Japanese and American culture.

While several film awards may have succeeded in overlooking "Shin Godzilla," "Godzilla Minus One" offers the critical bait of being a post-World War II foreign-language historic period piece, which practically makes it catnip for the Oscars, so I'm not sure they'll be able to resist finally giving the kaiju their cinematic due.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]