Godzillas: Shin Godzilla (2016) and Godzilla Minus One (2022)

Watched those two movies this week. Never saw any of the Godzilla movies before. Damn this post would be better with pictures but it's low-effort late-night blogging and you get what you pay for.

In Shin Godzilla, the monster just walks. People say this a couple times through the movie, and it's a great line, so it's worth repeating. The monster did all that... and it just walks. It doesn't want anything. It isn't angry and it doesn't hate you. It's not trying to hurt you. It just walks.

That's a fantastic(al), alien portrayal of a monster. Monster as natural disaster. (Everybody else has already made the comparisons with the tsunami and nuclear incident, which is intentional, but none of the reviews on wikipedia talk about how the monster just walks.)

(Ok it smacks people and shoots lasers when somebody is attacking it, but that barely counts.)

Still from Shin Godzilla; the monster's first form, adorkable! I love how fishy it looks

The monster is too big. It's about 100 m tall. That is so ridiculously tall that it doesn't register properly as a monster. Just looks fake.

There's very little plot. Mostly just people scrambling. I appreciated that, it felt like a reasonable depiction of a country in crisis, and still made me tense.

Godzilla Minus One is a real movie, by which I mean that it has plot, characters, theme, etc. Genuinely emotionally moving at times. It wimps out on its ending, which is too fairy-tale Hollywood action for my taste, especially the final scene.

This monster is appropriately sized. 50 m. It felt a lot bigger since I could actually conceptualize it, and I regularly saw it in the same shot as humans and human artifacts. It did cool stuff with its arms when it was in the water, which was an improvement over the Shin Godzilla Godzilla, whose arms did nothing whatsoever.

Great acting by the main character and a literal child.

Here's a fun behind the scenes video of the main character screaming. I thought he did a good job. Reminded me of the other good screaming scene I watched this week, from Mandy (2018). I'm adding it here because the resemblance tickled me. Unfortunately I couldn't find a clip of the whole scene, but here's how that scream scene starts:

Ok, now for the complaints. Here's a spoiler warning for you.

If your movie is about the question, "How can a man move forward with his life after losing everything?", you can't end the movie by giving him the exact things he thought he lost.

That pissed me off.

To briefly recap, in GMO, Koichi loses everything. By chickening out of being a kamikaze pilot, he loses his own self-respect and those of his fellows. By chickening out of shooting at Godzilla, he gets his fellows killed. And when he returns home after the war, he is rejected by his neighbors, who recognize his cowardice, and he is left alone, because the US firebombing of Tokyo has killed his family. (Don't worry, this is an anti-Imperial Japan movie. It won't argue that he should have been a suicide bomber instead, though characters in the movie do believe that.)

He builds a new life, haunted by his errors. Then Godzilla kills the woman he loves, and he has again lost everything. How can he move forward?

Of course he has not lost everything. He has a daughter now, and peers who respect him. He has been brave, and tried to live well. I want the movie to tell me, "And that's enough". It does do that, obviously, but it gilds the lily too by showing that, whoops, the woman he loves is still alive, guess he didn't lose anything the second time!

Three final bellyaches.

We hear the line "My war is not yet over" and similar many times, five or more. It's not a good line, too schlocky.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of predictability, but if I can storyboard literally the entire climax of a movie, beat for beat, when I'm only 70 minutes into the movie, we're probably too far into rote territory to say anything interesting. On a related note, I generally don't like when movies reveal things in flashbacks, and I didn't like it in this one either. You've gotta have a mega-humma surprise that recontextualizes everything for a flashback reveal to be worthwhile. If everybody already knows what the flashback is going to tell us, then the flashback isn't revealing anything and it isn't resolving any tension; in other words, it's useless.

Really dislike when the camera in an action movie moves past many deaths casually while lingering on the possibility of a single death. This destroys a movie's ethical credibility. There's a shot of Godzilla tossing a ship out of the harbor which is probably played for laughs, goes by very quick. That's gotta be 50 or more people dead. Five or six minutes later, when Koichi is doing his suicide bomber fakeout, we get a loooooong slow motion shot of him flying towards the monster, while the people nearby watch in horror and awe and shout "No!". I wouldn't pick on this movie for that, it's standard action movie fare, except that this movie makes a big deal out of its respect for life in the face of tragedy, and deals with mass death and suffering sensitively, without mawkishness, on other occasions.