When was the last time a Godzilla movie was a good movie? Not good for a monster movie, but a good movie? Godzilla Minus One is a good movie and is available on Netflix. It won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, has a 7.9 on IMDB and 98%/98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Godzilla Minus One cost $15 million to make and pulled $56 million at the domestic box office. For comparison, Godzilla x Kong has an IMDB rating of 6.2, cost $150 million to make and pulled $196 million in domestic ticket sales. Godzilla x Kong turned a profit, but is a forgettable movie.
Why was Godzilla Minus One so much better at a tenth the cost?
- It’s not funny or even a fun movie. G M 1 is an action movie with emotional depth. The movie takes the time to introduce characters and get the viewer to care about them. The characters are normal people for their time and place. They are not hilariously inept or cowardly, they don’t make quips, aren’t extraordinarily brave or super smart. They aren’t fashionably casual, or trendy.
- The characters don’t come with a bag full of trauma to justify why they are petulant and unlikable. That was a big problem with the TV show, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which is part of the same franchise as G x K. The setting is post-WW II Japan, so the trauma is obvious and everyone is doing their best to survive with some humanity.
- The movie doesn’t try to overwhelm with spiffy technology, spectacular scenery, teams of government scientists, or unlikely weapons. Godzilla looks believable, but there aren’t scenes meant to look impress the viewer with awesomeness.
- Japan is threatened, but the movie is about an impromptu family. The stakes are human sized. The tension comes from the people in the family surviving, not saving Japan, the world, the multiverse or other stakes too big to care about.
One aspect of Godzilla Minus One was unusual. In Independence Day, and some other American movies, there is a national pride that is central to the plot. For Americans, we are proud of our military, our ingenuity and our ability to pull together despite our differences. That isn’t often shown in foreign movies. Since this was post-WW II in Japan, the kamikaze tradition comes up and along with other aspects of culture that develop in a country that just got their ass kicked in a world war that they started.
Godzilla Minus One is not a perfect movie. Everyone was Japanese, so no diversity at all. When the little kid cries, she sounds like a baby crying. The aircraft used in the final battle was too unconventional.
Godzilla Minus One is a movie that will stick with me for a while. 9/10.
The movie reviewer, Critical Drinker, does a better job explaining it.
