I wrote a bit in Everybody's in L.A. about the constraint of evaluating the merit of something that's in conversation with a genre you don't really care for in the first place; I don't care much for late night shows, and I care even less for kaiju movies, even with my knowledge of "Godzilla is a metaphor for the destruction and threat wrought by nuclear war" and the litany of thinkpieces therein.
The majority of the hay made about Godzilla Minus One is about two things:
- It's scant $15m budget;
- How well it works as a postwar Japan film even without the Godzilla stuff.
I can certainly agree with the former — the scale and craft of the effects were very well done — and the latter is where things lose me. The protagonist is certainly more interesting than your typical disaster film's, and the extended metaphor of survivor's guilt has more emotional resonance than more films in this genre — but come on, guys, this is still a Godzilla film, and the credulity required therein (let alone the paper-mache thinness of every other character in the script) means that I can like this relative to the Cloverfield Projects of the world, but it's still not exactly going down in my history books.
★★★
