I’m not sure how, or even what exactly. All I know is that, 45 minutes after scanning my QR-codes and finding my seats, I realized that I was, in the vintage acid-head phrase, “coming on.”
Neck hairs rose, perspective warped, time expanded like accordion bellows, and, there in my Jujubee-strewn La-Z-Boy at a Manhattan AMC, I realized I was either tripping or witnessing what the art and philosophy podcasters of Weird Studies podcasts call an egregore — an astral entity summoned by the collective thoughts of one group of people that’s so potent it roams free in the psychic realm for ages after it’s conjured, stomping on cars, tossing trains.
In other words, I took my 11-year-old to see Minus One: Minus Color, the b&w version of the recent film Godzilla Minus One, where I perceived a rift in entertainment space-time.
Old-school LSD gurus stress the importance of set, or mindset, and setting in a psychedelic experience. As far as the set goes, I’m no kaiju freak but I guess I should admit to giving Calder at least one art-damaged Godzilla tee every birthday and Christmas for years, along with the street-name Caldzilla, though I missed all advanced hype for this particular entry.
Setting was less auspicious, given AMC’s usual pre-feature assault of five deafening, jump-scare-packed trailers, a soaring CGI paean to carbonated beverages, and that damn Nicole Kidman monologue where she strolls through an empty theater hailing the spiritually redemptive powers of the multiplex to an audience that already bought a damn ticket. But after all this, the sight of the stately vintage Toho production logo shimmering on screen felt like a muezzin’s call to prayer.
To quote YouTube poster megagangster321, “When you see this logo you know it's gonna be either a batshit crazy movie, a badass yakuza movie, a classic anime movie or a huge monster movie.” What you don’t expect is that it will be the best huge monster movie ever made.
How? Why? What kind of special sauce did writer, director, and “VFX supervisor” Takashi Yamazaki have at his disposal? This is the kind of ingenious, well-crafted Japanese product that must have driven American manufacturing execs nuts in the ‘70s and ‘80s. A screenplay that honors the source material, entwines it with a resonant story of trauma and survivor’s guilt, and sets the whole thing into a fiendish little 125-minute work of science-fiction horror cinema that plays as historic epic? How’re we supposed to compete with that!
But Minus One also seems to draw on a deeper, communal well of magic, using an anachronistic visual language with the reverence of an ancient curate, forgoing all campy winks and meta asides so as not break the spell. A spell first cast three score and ten years ago, conceived in atomic terror, and dedicated to the proposition that a guy in a monster suit could be scary. Apparently this film’s dark, poetic essence is still there, beneath 70 years of sequels, reboots, parodies, memes, and this film somehow pulls it from the past, or sure seemed to last Saturday.
While secondary to the spectacle, the plot certainly moves things along in a stirring, human way. It follows a failed kamikaze pilot from the final days of WWII, who staggers through the first act in a daze of shame and trauma, returns to a devastated Tokyo, shelters in a bombed-out building with an unhoused young woman and an orphaned female toddler, forming an ad-hoc nuclear family that will connect the pilot to his life force once enough subway cars, tanks, and fishing vessels have been sent flying. And when that starts happening, this film is just majestic.
Yamazaki doesn’t pay homage to the 1954 film’s most resonant sequences so much as stage and perform them, like a contemporary Bayreuth Festival might stage and perform The Ring cycle. The most emblematic of these moments, indeed the Vorspiel of the entire kaiju lineage, happens 40 minutes into Godzilla Minus One, which time-stamps it with the subtitle “May, 1947,” presenting a set piece that transcends every previous effort, along with the huge-monster genre itself.
Godzilla Making Landfall is one of the great themes in art history — up there with Rape of the Sabine Women, Bonaparte Crossing the Grand Saint-Bernard Pass, Washington Crossing the Delaware — and there’s a purity to this rendition unlike anything I’ve seen from the past 50 years, including 2016’s canonical Shin Godzilla. Yamazaki lays the groundwork for the big moment with shifting perspectives and over-layed media: Japanese newsreel, a US military intelligence film, a crude Dr. Strangelove-style animated map depicting some top-secret event at real-life H-bomb testing site Bikini Atoll — all auguring an event that will occur in its own imaginal space.
Then, the camera observes the arrival of a 300-foot creature with unaffected directness. None of the portentous editing, found-footage blur, or other visual hype from a Western disaster film. Instead: wide shots of a meticulously recreated post-war Japanese city as glimpsed from the windows of a passing elevated train, before an airborne 18-wheeler hurtles into shot, lands on the tracks ahead, and sends our gaze searching for its source.
When we spot it in the distance, surrounded by smoke and scurrying humanity, the needle drops on Akira Ifukube’s original doomy lower-brass leitmotif, whose elemental power countless hip-hop battle DJs have borrowed, and at whose entrance, I’m embarrassed to say, my son and I high-fived.
As it plays, Godzilla squats there for a moment: ridiculous and sublime but there. I can’t figure out Somehow, the fine-grained black-and-white images mask or sublimate the state-of-the-art VFX to produce a spectacle that feels both vivid and historical, as if Godzilla has just pulled us through a rift and into a space where things like it — hitherto seen only in hilariously-dubbed b-movies — actually exist.
We see its massive gargoyle’s claw grasp a subway car nearly identical to the ones on Manhattan’s 1 and 2 lines, raise it from an elevated platform like the Third Avenue El in archival films of NYC, and smash it into a building that explodes in way that also echoes recent New York history. The effect isn’t sensational in the way of today’s edge-lord disaster films, but baleful, tragic, terrifying — the immersive scale swallowing tiny lives that don’t look at all like ants. I later read an interview with The Verge, in which Yamazaki said he set this film just before the time of the original to portray “how Japanese survivors felt after WWII, and even in such an escapist film, I found it impossible to see the rubble of former homes and desperate scrambling for food and keep thoughts of Gaza entirely at bay. Or to hear one broadcaster announce one attack’s death toll as 30,000 without thinking of the latest figures from the UN.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that this godzilla movie a meaningful response to war and nuclear terror. But I am going to say it eats Oppenheimer for breakfast. And it starts doing so early on, at the end of the attack on the city of Ginza. When tanks roll and start battering Godzilla with artillery, there’s one of those deceptive, act-two pauses that hint at a premature end to the conflict. This is when the massive creature shrugs into posture that reminded me of the one my childhood pet, an English bulldog, assumed in those rare moments when she sensed serious threat from other dogs: lowering her huge head into an asana of ominous potential energy, a Howitzer locking into position.
So poised, Godzilla begins to swell, emitting shards of blinding light from slits around its back plates, as some kind of organic fusion reactor ignites somewhere deep within its guts to surge up, erecting each spiky plate along its vertebrae as it rises until the monster rears back and screams out retina-blazing, directional nuclear blast that’s jaw-droppingly convincing as a new global menace.
That this nuclear heat ray plays as an argument-ender on a par with Little Boy is one of a dozen-odd ways this film shows a stronger engagement with the actual topic of Oppenheimer, which is also the one truly significant fact about its title physicist and certainly the only reason to make a feature film about him. The fact that people sit in an IMAX theater to watch that film’s History Channel subcommittee hearings and not a terrifying, purpose-built spectacle like this is one of 2023’s sick jokes.
While it’s no history biopic, I did sense more geopolitical and historic savvy in the screenplay than I’m qualified to clock, as we see Japan prevented from marshaling its own navy to defend against Godzilla for fears of disrupting the post-war Soviet-U.S. détente, moving the demobilized admirals and commanders to lead a fleet of decommissioned vessels in battle against a giant enemy, who, not for nothing, represents the United States in many interpretations of the original. Yamazaki reaches from this conflict toward its implications for a nation, or a planet, whose residents have to decide whether or not to live.
This film briefly gave me a pretty good one last weekend, as it filled one of our increasingly embattled public spaces with a true communal moment. It came near the climax, as the hero was piloting his fateful mission toward the ship-encircled creature, after Godzilla shrugged into his ominous death-ray position, and the atomic fire began coursing upwards toward release. Right there, with Godzilla’s head cocked his head back to exhale a blinding nuclear wind, the entire soundtrack drops to near silence—no score, no explosions, no dialogue—while the camera cuts from one character to another, from one intense, desperate, sweaty, terrified, tearful expression to the next, stretching out the narrative time to agonizing length.
And in this moment of extreme suspense, a cliffhanger set to 11, I swear that, for a good six or seven seconds, not one person in our crowded New York theater so much as peeped, so much as breathed. Instead, a palpable, all but audible presence filled this public space, which was, I now believe, suspended disbelief. May you find some of your own this weekend.
Peace!