Godzilla Minus One is an astonishing retro and mourning blockbuster (review)

After its two-day release in December, the Japanese prequel to Godzilla returns to theaters from January 17 to 31.

Magic of sequences: discover Godzilla Minus One just after seeing the trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. There is a gulf between the two. More than a pit, in fact. It looks like the two films were actually made on two different planets. On Planet A, the sequel to the bloated and fluorescent franchise where what remained of Adam Wingard’s personality has definitively dissolved. On planet B, well… the absolute opposite?

Let’s start again, a little more clearly: in this completely new Godzilla, we are in Japan, in 1947 (seven years before the release of the very first film in the saga). The country is in ruins, and the survivors are trying to rebuild on the ruins. A blended family (a failed suicide bomber, a thief and an orphaned baby) lives in a shantytown – an unexpected ghostly setting emerging from Enraged dog by Kurosawa- while a monstrous beast, awakened by American nuclear tests in the Pacific, approaches Japan to destroy everything. In Minus OneGodzilla is as much the incarnation of the consequences of the bomb as that of the guilt of the survivors of the war: his hero, Shikishima, is traumatized both by his cowardice (he refused to accomplish his mission as a suicide pilot) and his first encounter with the monster at the end of the war.

The horizon of Minus One is not that of a stupid reboot: no rereading of the franchise with the aesthetics of the 2020s: the director Takashi Yamazakialready in charge of the visual effects of the magnificent Shin Godzilla (which has finally been released on Blu-ray in France, seven years after its Japanese release), gives his film a stunning retro patina, where we find Spielbergian flashes (those ofAlways and Sea teethbrought together in the same film), characters straight out of 1950s sci-fi movies (the scientist with glasses who presents his eccentric plan to defeat the monster on slides)… GMO can be appreciated above all as a great, bright and professional adventure film, which beautifully celebrates the strength of the collective in the face of government inertia.

This way of exorcising the memory of the war can be criticized (is it really a German plate that we see in the cockpit of a prototype plane, which plays a big role at the end?), but the guy takes advantage of it also to pick us up through astonishing melodic tunnels, where tears are never far away: witness this wonderful stammering love story between the hero and Noriko, his companion in misfortune, forever united by the weight of a mourning which will never fade.

The American blockbuster is in an outdated coma, and the latest indisputable success to date was Nope by Jordan Peele, as much a twisted and haunting mystery film as it is a spectacular monster hunt in IMAX. Godzilla Minus One –which will only be released for two days in France, in IMAX theaters in particular– is its Japanese cousin: as clear and precise as Nope was twisted, but just as haunting, and just as spectacular. How lucky we are to be on planet B.

Godzilla Minus One, in cinemas from January 17 to 31, 2024