With all due respect to Shin Godzilla, the acclaimed 2016 monster movie that I have not yet seen, I hereby declare that Godzilla Minus One is the greatest Godzilla film ever made.  And I’ve seen a bunch of them.  The early Toto adventures featured a guy in a rubber suit stomping around on miniature city sets, and while those were affectionately entertaining, they were impossible to take seriously.  And some of them were intended to be comedic.  Then came the 21st century Godzillas, with CGI effects and ethical questions about whether the Big Guy is villainous by nature, or just a monster out of time.  Now we finally have an actual movie, with Godzilla as a prominent, and incredibly impressive, character.

Takashi Yamasaki’s tale is essentially a reboot, a retelling from the beginning, of how Godzilla rose from ocean depths at the end of World War II to wreak havoc upon Japan.  The story covers the next two years, as Japan suffers its second humiliating defeat, this time at the huge feet, sweeping tail and atomic heat ray of a dinosaur, turned by radiation into something wholly menacing and destructive.  Only a combined effort of Japan’s citizenry and Navy veterans can avoid total catastrophe, and even then the odds are not good.

This Godzilla — beautifully designed and realized in magnificent detail — is only onscreen for eleven minutes or so.  But those minutes are spellbinding; its attack on and pursuit of two wooden ships is genuinely awesome and thrilling.  Its attacks on Ginza and Tokyo put all the earlier movies’ model-stomping sequences to shame.  And yet, this story is a decidedly human one, of a failed kamikaze pilot (Ryonosuke Kamiki) with excessive guilt who befriends a young widow (Minami Hamabe) and her baby in devastated post-war Tokyo, given a second chance by fate to face the monster that bedevils his dreams.  The human story is beautifully enacted and incredibly compelling by itself.  It’s kind of like Titanic: Rose and Jack have an amazing love story and, oh, yeah, there’s an iceberg . . .

Various Godzilla films have explored the symbolism and cultural meaning that Godzilla represents to Japan, and this one is no different.  Seventy years after the first Godzilla movie, Japan is still wrestling with the effects of losing a war and radiation poisoning and not having a military and guilt over asking its soldiers to perish for the cause, and shades of those issues permeate the reasoning and actions taken in this story.  I think second, third and fourth viewings would only deepen one’s appreciation and, perhaps, understanding, of these matters.  But, primarily for us Western viewers, this is a monster movie.  And it’s a damn good one, the finest of its kind that I’ve ever seen.  ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2.  23 December 2023.