On "Godzilla Minus One" for The Atlantic

I used to run like hell from Godzilla movies, not out of fear but embarrassment. As a Japanese-American teenager in diversity-poor rural New England, I winced at the sight of a dude in a rubber suit stomping on cardboard cities. It looked silly and cheap, two Asian stereotypes I was trying hard to live down, so I ran even faster from the Americans I knew who actually liked Godzilla to avoid being cast as yet another Asian American nerd.

 

Evidently, Godzilla outran me. Japan’s nuclear lizard is now the face of the world’s longest-running film franchise, according to Guinness World Records, turning 70 this year on the heels of its most successful iteration yet. Released into U.S. theaters with scant publicity, “Godzilla Minus One” is North America’s highest-grossing Japanese-language movie ever and has surpassed the $100 million mark globally on a production budget of under $15 million. A box office blockbuster with a price tag minus one of Hollywood’s lavish digits. It’s also an award-winning critical hit, nominated by the Academy for Best Visual FX and widely praised for telling an emotionally absorbing story set in a devastated postwar Japan.

 

I first saw the movie last November when it premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival. I was less moved than impressed—not so much by the digital monster, but by the skillful sleight of hand behind the movie’s historical dissonance. While the film’s sets and costumes look period-based, its story, characters and emotional resonance are piercingly up-to-the-minute.

 

No longer a prophylactic-sheathed performer, the mightier if less endearing computer-generated Godzilla roars to life in the first few minutes, menacing a group of Japanese mechanics and grounded pilot Koichi Shikishima on a barren South Pacific island. 

 

For some reason, Shikishima can’t bring himself to pull the trigger (it's a giant lizard for chrissake!) of the machine gun only he can operate, and all but one of the mechanics is murdered. A failed kamikaze fighter and accidental family man suffering a very contemporary crisis of masculinity, Shikishima (whose surname is also an ancient poetic term that once meant "Japan") is an action hero so paralyzed by his fear of commitment that he can barely take any action at all. 

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