Monday, December 18, 2023
Godzilla Minus One
Japan’s most famous kaiju, Godzilla, is back celebrating its 70th anniversary. It’s 1945 in the final days of WWII & a Japanese kamikaze pilot diverts from his mission to land at airplane maintenance station on a remote island. There, he has his first encounter with the island’s legendary beast. However, he becomes frozen with fear & his inaction results in many deaths. Months later, the war is over & he returns to a devastated Tokyo where begins a relationship with a young lady & a baby girl. He gets a dangerous job working on minesweeper when he has his second Godzilla encounter. The creature mutates to gargantuan size with a new radioactive power. Japan’s military might has been stripped after the war so it’s a citizens’ scientific plan used to try & stop Godzilla. Riddled with guilt & obsessed with vengeance, the kamikaze pilot volunteers to help. This is a terrific reboot of this horror monster classic. The film has great visuals & captures the spirit of the original but with modern special effects techniques. The plot here is character driven but still has those action sequences that we want to see. The dialogue is in Japanese with English subtitles. Who will survive this latest monster attack? Will the plan to stop Godzilla work? Who are we kidding? These monsters never really go away. They are always temporarily halted. I️‘m sure this is not the last we will see of Godzilla. On another note: I️ never could decipher the meaning of the film’s odd title. Maybe, something was lost in translation?
Alien gives it 3 “Odo Island” stars out of 4.
