[GoldenXtreme]

Finally got around to watching Godzilla Minus One! It's a solid kaiju movie, although not particularly mind-blowing and certainly not what I expected from the trailers and reception. I think my favorite bit of the movie is how they used the post-war setting to have the human characters fight Godzilla with extremely limited resources, which stood out from the typical super science you see in these sorts of films. The story was quite simple, following traumatized a WWII veteran who avoided death as a Kamikaze pilot. It's nicely told, but lacks any major surprises. It also felt like the story was just a prologue to the real plot to me. The Minus One version of Godzilla has strong Hollywood influence compared to the more classically tokusatsu Shin incarnation. To me, he lacked much impact, feeling relatively weak as a monster since the humans had to fight him with so little and only having a few big destruction scenes. Comparing him to the Shin version again, I actually found MiGodzi less scary because he almost felt anthropomorphized with the way he stared right at people. In the end, I kind of feel like the period setting was a mistake. Godzilla is at its best as a tool for social commentary of some sort, and the WWII setting restricted it to making some lukewarm commentary on the Japanese government's disregard for the lives of their own soldiers during the time. America gets very little flack even when it would be relevant to bring up. Even disregarding that this version of Godzilla was seemingly mutated by nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll, they also completely glaze over America was strong-arming Japan into disarming at the time. What can I say, both the monster and the commentary felt rather defanged in this one. Hoping the next film improves on some of these points, but I'm just happy we might be able to actually get regular Japanese Godzilla films again!