“Godzilla Minus One”, a successful return to the roots for the saga

The new adaptation of the giant lizard franchise, which takes place in post-war Japan and was particularly successful on American territory, is a success both in substance and form. The film is released on Wednesday January 17 for two weeks in French cinemas.

Godzilla Minus One is the 37th film to feature the famous giant lizard, since the first adaptation in 1954. And it is a great success, firstly in form, the scenes of destruction of the city of Tokyo by the monster are stunning. Which makes you smile when you know that director Takashi Yamakazi used a budget of 15 million dollars, where the latest American version to date, Godzilla versus Kongin 2021, had cost 200 million for a fairly poor result.

“First of all, it is the return to Japan of this license with fanfare, but also a return to the sources and a very intelligent ‘reboot’ of the first original Godzilla, a period film which puts humans back at the center of this universe, explains Daniel Andreyev, journalist specializing in Japanese pop culture. And it’s also a license that the country is reappropriating and a real blockbuster, but from a Japanese point of view.”

“It was made for 15 million dollars, but it looks like a film that cost 200, it is so realistic and its reconstructions are successful. Whereas the trend was the opposite in recent big productions, with a lot of money but a fairly mediocre and visually poor result.”

Daniel Andreyev, journalist specializing in Japanese pop culture

at franceinfo

A film about trauma

Basically now, what makes the quality of Godzilla Minus One is undoubtedly its context: it takes place directly in post-World War II Japan, and shows the misery of starving Japanese, then in the camp of the vanquished. The monster is then both a metaphor for the country’s flagging pride, its patriotism, and a consequence of American nuclear bombs.

“In this story we are interested in what happens to veterans and war veterans, all these traumatized people, and in that it is a real film about trauma, Daniel Andreyev further explains. Either by the loss of the war, the atomic bomb, but also the guilt of not having been on the right side of history, for some. But the film plays on both counts, this realism and the spectacular, because we also have what we signed up for, that is to say a big lizard which destroys cities. And he does it with an efficiency that we haven’t seen in Japanese cinema for a long, long time.”

Godzilla Minus One has already collected more than 35 million dollars in Japan, and 49 million in the United States, a record for a Japanese film and the fifth highest score in history for a non-American film.