It took me a long time to get around to seeing this movie, because I finally got to experience the thrills of #covid for the first time, after years of dodging it. I had it through the movie's release and then concerns about very crowded showings, etc, but I'm grateful that this movie did well enough to hang on in theaters long enough for me to see it.

This movie is what I have always wanted to see in a Godzilla movie - a film that is actually a spiritual successor to Godzilla (1954). That movie is an all-time great movie, extremely well-crafted, and a very interesting interpretation on the themes of war, the dropping of the bombs, and everything else going on in it. Essentially every other Godzilla movie after that is nothing like that at all. Some of them are good, a lot of them are fun, and some of them are badly American, but none of them are the same type of movie as the original (well, there are also many I haven't seen! but I have my doubts).

Shin Godzilla actually did kind of start trying in some ways to be "about" something, but Godzilla Minus One finally achieves it, a movie that feels like it is actually a modern Original Godzilla. It is about coping with war, it is about PTSD, it is about survivor's guilt, it is about moving forward through tragedy and building a life for yourself after the unthinkable, and the human experience of being faced with problems too big to solve (for instance, a massive mutating dinosaur creature leveling your homes). And then it is about solving them anyway, through community, and faith (non-religious variety), and letting your own personal wars finally end. I actually don't need to say too much about these themes because many of them are kind of self-evident and the whole point of this kind of art is to ask you to think about them on your own. So I shall leave it to the reader to ponder the relationship, for instance, between being a kamikaze fighter at the behest of the nation (a government) vs an anti-kamikaze fighter in service of the nation (the people).

I suppose one distinction I'd make between this and the original is that in the first movie, Godzilla largely represents external forces (the bombs, America, whatever specific name you want to choose) and how to confront such problems. This movie feels to me more like Godzilla represents an internal conflict, struggling to come to terms with yourself and reach the right state of mind, even though it is still literally an external threat in the form a huge lizard with a heat ray. And where Shin Godzilla is about Society, this movie is about the Individuals within that society, and that somehow makes it feel more personal and introspective, even though it follows a very similar overall story arc.

tldr; it is cool to see huge lizard monsters crawl out of the depths to crush things.

Score: 8/10

IMDb: Godzilla Minus One

PS: I know I talk often about how low-budget effects are so much more compelling because of the creativity they force, and I don't think this movie is an exception. It is famously low budget for a huge release with a big monster in it, and yet they do not shy away from having him on screen, and it all works out really well. Marvel, please, I am begging you, take note. A random Low Budget Effects fun fact: they played the original Godzilla noise through loudspeakers and recorded it to achieve this Godzilla's noise. /Godzillanoise