Last night I attended an early screening of Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One. Despite Godzilla’s recent American films and Monarch series on Apple Plus, TOHO Studios has returned to its signature IP for the first time since the acclaimed Shin Godzilla in 2016. Although I’d heard positive feedback from its Japanese debut nearly a month ago, I was ill-prepared for just how good it actually was.

This isn’t a review – just my reaction as a Godzilla fan who has seen all thirty-seven of his films (including US releases) multiple times and has two adult sons who not only followed in my fanboy footsteps but have treaded a great deal further. Thanks to attending nearly twenty years of G-FEST, I have gotten to see many of these movies on the big screen as well as the privilege of meeting many of the franchise’s key players both in front and behind the camera. Naturally, I expected to enjoy this movie whether it was “good” by mainstream critic standards or not.

What I did not expect, however, was having one of the best theater experiences of 2023 while spending hours trying to decide if any previous Godzilla movies (aside from the incomparable Gojira 1954) even came close to being as good as this one. Nearly twenty-four hours later, I’ve concluded that the answer is no. 

This movie accomplished with fifteen million dollars what Hollywood can’t seem to do with three hundred (yes, Disney, I’m looking at you). The writing is excellent and the characters are actually compelling. You’d never convince me of this when I was kid, but well-written, human characters are integral to any monster movie including Godzilla. In fact, I’d argue that the human characters in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) were so bad they derailed what should have been a monster movie home run.  In this film, there wasn’t a single character I didn’t find myself rooting for; thereby raising the stakes and making this rendition of Godzilla the most terrifying I’ve ever seen. At one point I even felt myself getting emotional which is a Godzilla movie first for me (unless you count the time I went through a box of Kleenex watching Godzilla melt-down in 1995’s Godzilla vs Destroyah). Despite the presence of a giant monster, Yamasaki takes great care to explore the human condition; calling into question how far one should go in service of government and how past failures impede our future happiness with feelings of undeservedness. He also does such a tremendous job illustrating Japan’s devastation after World War II that you can’t help but feel a terrible sense of dread when Godzilla finally reaches main land.

The only real complaint I can come up with is that I did predict the movie’s twists in its last act but they were executed well enough that I wasn’t bothered by it.

On a technical level, I felt the film’s color spectrum truly enhanced the story’s ‘1940s setting and this is one movie I can not wait to see in 4K! I did see this on a Premium “Ultra” screen at my theater but am hoping to see it again on IMAX. I don’t think you need to be a devout Godzilla fan like me to enjoy this picture – I believe it’s just a great movie, PERIOD. As I left the theater I couldn’t help but mention to my son that while the United States may have won the war, this year Japan conquered us at the movies…and man did we deserve it!

Dave~