Godzilla - Why Minus One Succeeded Where Hollywood FAILED

2023 has been a watershed year at the box office after almost two decades of dominance it's looking more and more like capes are out and just about everything else is back in but this seismic shift in the market goes far beyond mere superhero fatigue or even General IP fatigue for that matter audiences have simply become more Discerning when it comes to the movies they spend their money on whether it's because movies are being dropped on streaming in home media way quicker than they used to or the higher cost of living in years following the pandemic has made consumers a little more selective when visiting the theater audience Behavior has changed almost overnight and resulted in an unpredictable year at the box office make no mistake folks are still turning out for the films based on pre-existing IP but those films have had to really stand out to put butts in seats one of the biggest draws has seemingly been the promise of a bold artistic Vision films like Barbie Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and SP fighter verse have thrived by promising to be something more than your run-of-the-mill franchise Fair each one highly stylized and briming with personality coinciding with this shift in audience appetite has been the return of the monster movie I don't know if you've noticed but Godzilla is back after years of tepid enthusiasm for legendary's monsterverse Godzilla versus Kong became one of the most successful theatrical releases during the pandemic while Apple TV's Monarch is being heralded as an unexpected Triumph of premium television and now we have Godzilla minus one a dark meditative return to the radioactive lizards roots and I don't think the Resurgence of this 75-year-old franchise in this particular cultural moment is a coincidence because in a way the Godzilla films have come to exemplify exactly the kind of franchise filmmaking audiences are craving reigning as the longest continuous running film franchise in the world Godzilla should be the epitome of the kind of corporate conveyor belt film making audiences rejected this year for God's sake there are 38 films in the Japanese series alone but somehow it isn't sure there was a time when too was pumping these films out to turn a quick profit but over time the series has evolved into something more settling into its Legacy status and becoming one of the most interesting and ambitious film franchises around while the American le Legendary series hearkens back to the pulpy fun of Godzilla's showa era albeit with a much larger budget the Toho Le projects of late have taken a more filmmaker driven approach enlisting the talents of some of Japan's finest filmmakers each new iteration of the series has reinvented Godzilla and his world to reflect the particular vision of the Storyteller this is evident in 2016's brilliant Shin Godzilla which radically reworked the character right down to his physiology to tell a harrowing story concerning the Japanese government's lethargic response to the Fukushima meltdown disaster so it's perhaps unsurprising that not even the 1-in tall barrier of subtitles could extinguish the hype for Godzilla minus one which has become one of the highest rated films of the year and the highest grossing Japanese film ever released in North America Beyond its jaw-dropping special effects and downright epic scope and scale minus one success can ultimately be traced down to its emotional core any assembly line can produce Cheap Thrills but it takes an artist to capture emotional truth and minus one is brimming with emotional truth thanks to the vision of director writer and VFX supervisor tekashi yamazaki a soul crushing meditation on National trauma and survivors guilt this is as much a story about Japan reclaiming its national identity post World War II as it is a glorious spectacle of Destruction Godzilla minus one can't help but feel like a Victory lap for a transformative year at the box office a film that fully embodies the changing tide of audience preferences let's wind the clocks back to 1945 and examine why this particular Kaiju movie is quite possibly the best Godzilla movie ever made but before we do this video is sponsored by ipsos iay ipsos iay is a survey based company that wants your personal and extremely valuable opinion on various topics in exchange for gift card rewards you can use to buy your favorite things like a new Godzilla one figure to add to your collection of Godzillas who wouldn't want this lovely thing on their shelf whether you use it to destroy model cities or sit on a shelf you can purchase your mini monster using gift cards earned through surveys on ipsos iay you can take Parts in surveys by answering simple questions and earn rewards for doing so I personally like the Visa gift cards because it gives me the freedom to spend my rewards wherever I please so say I didn't want that Godzilla figure I could go to Target or Best Buy and buy steelbook books Blu-rays 4ks you know all that stuff cuz I'm a movie lover and actually the most recent thing I did with my Sav rewards was use them to purchase a record player I've had my eye on from Amazon not too long ago the best part about it is that these surveys are tailored to my interest so I never get bored plus they're so easy I can fill them out whenever I have free time like when I'm at the gym training for an inevitable Kaiju attack I can curl in one hand and tell ipsos iay my opinions in the other and thank you so much again to IPOs I say for sponsoring today's video now back to Godzilla the thing that immediately stands out about Godzilla minus one is that it's a period piece despite the fact Godzilla is so intrinsically tied to the atrocities committed against Japanese civilians at the end of the second world war its films seldom revisit this period instead opting to move forward with time sometimes even going far off into the future and while it makes sense to keep the series in a contemporary setting it feels like a missed opportunity that the series has never gone full p period piece until now opening in the final days of the war minus one follows a group of War veterans each struggling with the sacrifices they made or didn't make while fighting an unwinable War you could even say these characters are living at Ground Zero both emotionally and literally like most Godzilla films much of this film is set in Tokyo which is in the process of rebuilding itself after the war while not subjected to the devastation of a nuclear blast the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Tokyo looks almost indistinguishable from those cities utterly flattened by firebombs a grave year with countless inocence buried beneath the smoldering Rubble but if Japan was Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the war the sudden appearance of a giant nuclear dinosaur pushes the country to something below even that minus one if you will much like the 1954 original Godzilla minus one isn't actually about Godzilla at least not really sure on the surface it's the story of a reptilian monster emerging from the seed wreak havoc in Japan but at its core it's about a much more real horror as everyone and their grandmother knows at this point ishiro Honda's classic was a deliberate metaphor for Japan's national trauma in the wake of the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a country already on its knees being decimated in a show of raw power by an uncaring Behemoth minus one is far from the first Godzilla film to go back to this metaphor but it's the first to explicitly concern the aftermath of the war the way the original did rather than focusing on the nuclear bomb itself minus one explores the way the war that preceded those bombings had already scared the psyche of the Japanese people a brutal protracted conflict that exposed the cruel inequity of Imperial Japan Godzilla forces the people to reckon with this inequality representing a physical manifestation of of a war not yet over for those who not only survived Combat on the battlefield but the cold indifference of their own leadership as yamazaki himself said in an interview with the Verge whenever Godzilla appears in film he brings a kind of reflection on nuclear war and any man-made crisis in post-war Japan citizens were decimated survivors everywhere were in desperate need of help and I wanted audiences to gain an understanding of how Japanese survivors felt after World War II more than just to stand in for the nuke in minus one Godzilla represents being on the receiving end of America's military might more broadly in fact this might be the most explicitly Godzilla has ever been equated to the United States as a nation bar maybe Godzilla Rays against in which his fight with angoras can be read as a microcosm of the cold war Japan found itself caught in the middle of in the prologue we learned that Godzilla has been living on the island of Odo for years more more or less coexisting with the local inhabitants on the island and even bringing deep sea fish to the surface for fishermen to collect Godzilla much like the United States prior to World War II was essentially a sleeping giant a powerful being but largely isolationist that is unless provoked in this way the Odo sequence of the film is a microcosm of Pearl Harbor in which a preemptive strike by the Japanese mechanics results in violent retaliation by God Zilla this parallel between Godzilla and the United States is made overt when the mechanics speculate whether Godzilla is some new yane weapon something that becomes quite literal when Godzilla is made nuclear as the result of us testing at bikini ATL a place it's reasonable to assume Godzilla wouldn't have been had the mechanics not driven him off Odo Island here the film suggests that Godzilla is the result of Japan poking the bear or I guess I should say lizard not no not that lizard just lizard like the Japanese military the mechanics on Odo were IL equipped to take on such a fearsome opponent but fearing its potential danger they attacked with the Assumption their aggression would be met with submission but instead it Unleashed Unholy Bloodshed made infinitely worse by their adversaries Newfound nuclear capabilities but L you think the film is letting the Americans off the hook lightly blaming their destruction of Japan on Japanese provocation the film very pointedly condemns the asymmetrical nature of America's response to Pearl Harbor throughout the film it's speculated that the newly nuclear Godzilla considers Tokyo a new part of its territory and that his ceaseless March towards Tokyo is an attempt to claim that territory Godzilla isn't just an embodiment of American military power but more specifically it's asymmetrical retaliation against Japan let's be clear the decision to kick a sleeping giant to deter them them from joining the fight was senseless at best and an act of huus at worst but the American response using the most fearsome weapon ever created to attack a country that was already on its knees twice was an astronomically unbalanced Act of barbarism and the people who suffered the consequences of that act weren't the people responsible for starting the war it was innocent civilians the United States collectively punished Japan for the sins of its government thinking their suffering would hurt the government by proxy but they overestimated how much the Japanese government cared about its people and even if they hadn't it wouldn't have Justified their actions Godzilla's attack on Ginza kicking a country while it's down mirrors the choices of the US government in the final days of the war the image of Godzilla standing in the shadow of a towering plume of smoke having laid waste to Ginza is seared into my brain the fact that the devastation eclipses even the Titanic lizard itself serves to symbolize just how asymmetrical America's reprisals truly were but while minus one's exploration of the war's lasting impact on Japan via Godzilla is endlessly compelling it's not the reason minus one is such a masterful piece of Cinema or at least it's not the only reason after all Godzilla as a metaphor for real world Devastation isn't exactly new ground for the SE series even if minus one's meditation on the subject explores this metaphor better than just about any other entri since the original no where this film truly shines is in its human characters yeah you heard me right the human characters in Godzilla minus one rule human characters have long been the charren of Kaiju films a necessary evil to drive the plot audiences may come to see the monsters but monsters alone can't carry a film at least at least not the kind of film that's palatable to a mainstream audience which puts the filmmakers in a tricky position they need human characters but they're kind of doomed to be the audience's least favorite parts of the movie at best being a mild distraction from what they really came to see so what do you do well the answer has typically been to Simply treat these characters as audience surrogates broadly drawn POV characters that can react to the monsters and contextualize their actions without eating into the monster screen time but while I'd argue there are plenty of human protagonists in the Godzilla films that I genuinely like like just about everyone in 2014 Godzilla yeah I'm one of the weirdos who didn't get offut by the fact that Brian Cranston died I actually thought that was kind of brilliant the characters in the Godzilla series by and large can't help but feel a little functional most of the time their stories are designed to be as unobtrusive as possible and that mentality has resulted in characters that feel both essential yet superflu they're front and center but it isn't really about them miraculously minus one manages to avoid this Trope while the human characters are absolutely audience surrogates they aren't only that they have fully formed inner lives and interpersonal relationships that are just as compelling as the Kaiju action and perhaps even more importantly they aren't plot devices the journey these characters go on is just as important to the story as Godzilla and in fact they deeply intertwined if Godzilla is the embodiment of American aggression in World War II then each of the three main characters is a byproduct of that aggression men broken by asymmetrical Warfare that was thrust upon them by a government that barely recognize their Humanity Yoji aitsu is a jaded veteran who despises his government's indifference to his people's suffering but has resigned himself to the idea that it will never change Kenji NOA is an engineer whose brilliant mind was wasted developing weapons of war that prioritized victory over survival and kuichi shikishima is a kamakazi pilot whose refusal to follow his orders and die for his country haunts him through these three men and their interactions with every character that surrounds them minus onean delivers an incredibly powerful indictment of the Imperial Japanese government and explores the psychological effects of Waging War on behalf of a regime that SS people as little more than Expendable ponds some of you may die but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make towards the end of the second act Nota brings this subtext to the Forefront lamenting the Imperial leadership's callous disregard for human life and accusing it of setting its soldiers up for failure by sending them to war against a technologically advanced adversary in flimsy tanks planes without ejector seats and little in the way of sustenance the nation and the emperor came Above All Else and soldiers in the Imperial Army were expected to be little more than obedient Canon fodder to win the war by any means necessary by the war's end this dehumanizing edict came to its logical and depressingly literal conclusion by way of the kamakazi pilots men who were ordered to use their bodies as weapons for the Empire deliberately flying their planes into enemy infrastructure in a futile attempt to postpone an Inevitable Defeat these suicide missions were perversely framed as an honor the honor of giving one's life to protect Japan but these deaths weren't to protect Japan they were a final desperate gasp by a regime that had failed its people and was unwilling to accept defeat minus one argues the kamakazi missions were a fundamental betrayal of the Japanese people and Humanity itself shikishima the most prominent of the three leads in the film is defined by this betrayal but rather than being driven by rigorous indignation he's suffocated by survivors guilt although he didn't die for what he recognized was a lost cause he still feels an incredible amount of shame that he didn't after all if your job is to die survival is quite literally failure this deep-seated guilt is made manifest in his relationships most notably his relationships with his neighbor Sumo and his brother in-arms Saku tachibana Upon returning to Tokyo after the war shikishima discovers his neighborhood has been leveled by incendiary bombs killing both of his parents as well as his neighbors young children but rather than embracing shikishima and taking solace in their shared grief suo instinctively blames him for what happened it turns out civilians were fed the same lies about honor and sacrifice as the kamakazi pilots so in seo's eyes shikishima survival is a dishonor tantamount to treason and the reason her family perished the ingenious cruelty of the way the Japanese government framed the kamakazi missions is how it turned survivors of the war like shikishima into scapegoats for the Empire's defeat lightning rods people's shame and grief that conveniently diverts attention away from the true architects of Japan's degradation its leaders suiko personifies this attitude taunting shikishima as attempts to find purpose in a life he's been made to feel he doesn't deserve this anxiety is compounded by his relationship with tachibana the only other survivor of the Odo Island attack like suiko tachibana resents shikishima for surviving he believes that had shikishima fired at Godzilla like he was ordered to their compatriots might have survived but whether he genuinely believes a plane's machine gun could have actually stopped the rampaging monster or not is less important than the simple fact that he believes shikishima inaction was cowardice to tachibana the failure to shoot regardless of whether it would have worked was indistinguishable from simply giving up something he already suspects shikishima had done when he grounded his plane and route to his kamakazi mission citing technical issues issues that tachibana couldn't find evidence for during his inspection of the craft to tachibana it would be better to die fighting than survive surrendering a sentiment that reflects the mentality of most of Japan's leadership in the final days of the war for these men surrender simply wasn't an option Japan had never been invaded nor had it ever lost a war and the idea of laying down arms while there was still a means to keep fighting was untenable there was no honor in cutting their losses but while this idea of fighting to the last breath is romantic it's a disastrously inhumane way to fight a war sacrificing real human lives for the abstract concepts of honor and national pride things that ultimately mean very little to dead men but in drawing this parallel between Tana's attitude towards surrender and the Japanese leaderships minus one suggests that this Foolish Pride was merely a mask concealing profound guilt and that the Japanese leadership's reluctance to accept defeat was the result of an unwillingness to accept their own culpability in that defeat just as it was easier to continue sending men to their deaths rather than admit they had mishandled the war preemptively striking Pearl Harbor and not equipping their soldiers well enough it's easier for tachibana to blame shikishima for refusing to fire at Godzilla than to confront his own responsibility in provoking the monster so in the aftermath of the battle tachibana projects his guilt onto shikishima a selfish Act made physical in the form of family photos of the soldiers who died in the end shikishima is only able to draw tachibana out of seclusion by recognizing their shared feelings of guilt and prying at it insinuating their deaths of their comrades were actually his fault to elicit a reaction the film argues that it's only through the acknowledgement of our shared trauma like this that our wounds can start to heal over the course of the film shikishima relationship with sumiko gradually shifts from spite to genuine affection as she comes to see shikishima isn't so different from herself when shikishima first takes in noro another orphan of the war and her adopted child Akiko suiko isn't dismissive of his charity her words bordering on outright cruelty as she ridicules him for wanting to be the hero now as if it'll make up for not being one before but as time goes on suo becomes a part of their little found family assuming the role of akiko's Aunt and helping to to raise her transforming her bereavement for her children into love for another similarly in seeing how heavily the guilt he had passed on to shikishima had weighed on him over the years so much so that he was prepared to kamakazi Godzilla in atonement for his failure to die with his Fallen comrades tachibana finally recognizes the inhumanity of his judgment and incorporates an ejector seat into his plane imploring shikishima to live rather than throw his life away in the grand scheme of things Sumo and tachibana aren't even a huge part of the movie but their arcs beautifully mirror the surviving soldiers real world relationship with both people of Japan and themselves as time went on people started to realized they were all victims of a system that took advantage of them A system that threw their bodies at a vein and futile conflict and reflected the blame back onto them once it was over and out of that realization came Unity likewise it's only once shikishima makes peace with sumo and tachibana that he can finally let go of his survivors guilt and choose to live beautifully reflecting Japan's move towards pacifism and democratization following the war however as important as these two relationships are in exploring the meta Narrative of the film shikishima inability to overcome his Survivor guilt and embrace life is most evident in his relationship with noro and Akiko although the trio essentially functions as a family for most of the film shikishima is unwilling to fully let his guard down and embrace that Dynamic when NOA and akitsu mistakenly assume noro is shikishima wife he's quick to rebuff them it's obvious he has feelings for her but he can't allow himself to move on from the war and live his life so he pushes her away likewise when Akiko refers to him as Daddy he coldly corrects her insisting he isn't her father it's not because he doesn't love her or care for her the way a father would but rather that he doesn't believe he deserves the love and respect that comes with the title noro and Akiko represent the life he wants but doesn't think he deserves there's a cruel irony in the fact that to get over his guilt shikishima needs to let people in and embrace life but his guilt leaves no room for those connections in his heart and mind his guilt is made even worse when noro seemingly dies in Ginza at the hands of Godzilla the monster he failed to kill in shikishima eyes it's as if Godzilla has come back to punish him for even considering moving on with his life he's the embodiment of the war he failed to fight returning to personally torment him it's this moment that commits shikishima to his suicide mission believing that he alone Must Destroy Godzilla as penance for his cowardice and perhaps in a lesser film this framing would go unchallenged a kind of Moby Dick tale without the moral with shikishima seeking Redemption by killing the monster that haunts him but the Brilliance of minus one is in how it subverts this Trope in almost every other Godzilla film in which Godzilla is the antagonist the day is saved by either the military or alone hero but in minus one the government is unwilling to get involved for geopolitical reasons cting the same indifference for its people it exhibited throughout the war and any individual attempt at heroism are shown to be selfish and self-defeating just as it was absurd to expect the tide to turn in the war by torpedoing enemy warships with man planes shikishima suicide plan is framed as a pointless Act of martydom and would only hurt the people who love him reor Akiko and widowing noro whom he doesn't yet realize survived the Ginza attack no instead it's Collective action that saves the day instead of operating on a plan drawn up by aof leader safely insulated in their bunkers the plan to take down Godzilla is devised by Nota one of the people his plan deliberately prioritizes the safety of the soldiers because he knows what it's like to serve Masters who don't care if people doing their Dirty Work live or die and he wants no part in it he tells the War veterans they've recruited for the that he can't guarantee their survival and for that reason he won't Force any of them to do it if they don't want to and some of them leave but he can guarantee no one will die as a result of the plan itself to the soldiers this is enough with one man joking that it's more of a chance than they were given in the war though shikishima is the one to deliver the final blow to the monster in this film flying his plane into the behemoth's mouth in what his hands down one of the most exhilarating moments of the the entire year the silence right before Godzilla is about to unleash his Atomic breath only broken by shima's plane crashing into its mouth just H it's so good even though the final blow is shikishima allowing him to achieve a semblance of closure for his guilt without having to give his life unnecessarily it wouldn't have been possible without the assistance of everyone else doing their part from NOA coming up with the plan to the civilians arriving in their boats to help pull Godzilla to the surface in an almost Dunkirk like fashion it's truly a fantastic payoff uniting the people of Japan to overcome their Collective trauma by destroying the embodiment of their suffering their Victory isn't a redo of the war as I've seen some people claim but rather it symbolizes a people letting go of the war allowing the fight to end in their hearts and Minds by showing a Way Forward together nowhere is This Way Forward forward more apparent than in shiru mizushima nicknamed the kid the youngest crew member on aitu's boat the kid embodies the generation under those who served in the war who were raised on the myths created by the Japanese government to justify their actions in the war his playful banter with akitu is genuinely amusing but Reveals His naive he's still a boy whose childlike innocence blinds him to the cruel reality of War one akitsu is all to a Ware of akitu lived through the war served his country and had his eyes open to just how much of a meaningless Pawn he was in the eyes of his government shiru can't possibly understand that but that isn't a bad thing in a perfect world we would all be unaware of how willing our government is to sacrifice our lives for its own interests but unfortunately for many that reality is their lived experience the banter between these two comes to a head right before the film's third act when Nota and akitu tell the kid he won't be joining them on this Mission the camera tracks two Veterans as they walk away leaving shiru to scream like a petulant child being denied a toy to him he's being denied a chance to prove himself worthy of the honor he feels NOA and akitu have earned but the reality is they aren't taking anything from him in fact as akitu says they're giving him the future by sparing him the same trauma they were subjected to having fought before they choose to fight again so that shiru and his generation won't have to they're fighting to finally end the war that still hasn't ended in their hearts in the hopes it will break that cycle forever but while this is a beautiful sentiment it isn't as black and white as shiru was wrong for wanting to serve his country in fact the movie is all about service to others but his reasons were wrong he wanted to serve for the honor it promised not realizing that honor was an illusion a carrot dangled by the powers that be to trick people into betraying their own best interests when shiru shows up to the battle with the other civilians it's not for individual Glory but out of solidarity with his people this moment was so beautiful and so incredibly earned and just ah it's so good I love it at the end of the day this movie isn't about a giant lizard monster it's about a victimized people overcoming the shame that was unfairly foed upon them by leaders in capable of taking responsibility it's a movie about love and life and fighting for things worth saving about championing people over abstract Concepts like honor and nationalism and about finding the will to live this beautiful and precious life we've each been given a small window to experience yes it's a god Zilla movie and you get your money's worth of Godzilla Mayhem but it's so so much more than just the spectacle of watching a giant radioactive lizard wreak havoc on a city in a year where audiences have realized they don't have to settle for less Godzilla minus one reminds us that we don't have to we can have it all and we deserve it

Channel: FilmSpeak

Views: 250,869

Keywords: filmspeak, video essay, ending explained, explained, when kaiju dominate the box office, godzilla minus one review, godzilla minus one is a masterpiece, godzilla minus one ending explained, godzilla minus one destroys hollywood, godzilla minus one is perfect, why godzilla minus one is so good, godzilla minus one explained, godzilla video essay, godzilla minus one analysis, godzilla minus one puts hollywood to shame, godzilla minus one movie review, godzilla, godzilla minus one

Id: bvV-_8Mmt9M

Length: 31min 20sec (1880 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023