Godzilla Minus One

 

Tachibana: Live.

I was not expecting such a devastating, gut-wrenching emotional rollercoaster. It was all I could do to keep myself from sobbing, especially at the end.

I can't do it justice, so I'm going to blatantly plagiarize. 

The Powerful Human Drama of Gozilla Minus One:

As soon as the credits rolled for Godzilla Minus One, I knew that I had seen a truly special film. It is, quite simply, a tour de force of moviemaking, a cinematic triumph... Godzilla Minus One is an extraordinarily human story. It is a story about men and the monsters we make. It is about grief, guilt, trauma, and the stark horror of total war. But it is also a story that speaks to hope in the midst of heart-rending tragedy, to courage in the face of near-certain defeat, to solidarity in spite of insurmountable odds, to forgiveness regardless of wounds that may never fully heal, and to life triumphant in defiance of death.

Gozilla Minus One is a Monstrous Triumph:

As the credits started rolling on Toho Studios’ latest kaiju blockbuster, I was left startled by the emotions burning in my chest. I was left nerve-ridden by the film’s incredibly tense bouts of destruction, the hairs on my arm standing in accompaniment to Naoki Sato’s roaring orchestral soundtrack. My eyes ached from tears shed, unexpectedly so, for the film’s painting of the human condition in both its darkest and most hopeful hours. Lastly, my head was clouded from confusion. Somehow, Godzilla: Minus One managed to not just be a spectacular monster-movie but an incredibly poignant and personal distillation of the effects that nationalist warfare had on the people of Japan after World War II... 

This film is at its core a rumination on the social effects Japan’s incredibly fascist disdain for life had on veterans coming out of World War II. Godzilla represents the might of America’s brutality, which was a response to Japan’s own; the monster being awakened in this film because of the physical effects of nuclear weaponry. Everything Shikishima goes through is driven by how he slowly recovers the humanity that warfare stripped him of.