• ⇤
• ⇽
• ≡
• ⇾
• ⇥

movie review - Godzilla -1.0

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This is a Gojira movie from Toho, the originators of the genre. I wasn't expecting to cry at the movie, but it had a strong story and a terrific plot and that's where I found myself. I can't say enough about this period piece that predates the first of the Gojira stories by a decade, spinning up when the bullets and warplanes have barely stopped flying in 1946. With a searingly austere setting of bomb-flattened Tokyo and a bad case of PTSD, we follow the tale of a veteran who blames himself for panicking during the titular monster's unexpected first appearance on some lonely atoll. We get to see the city slowly recover, and the hero make uneasy steps toward recovery, but naturally he's far too much of a mess to be a proper husband to the woman he's living with, and straight-up tells her maybe-foundling daughter that he's not her father.

With Gojira growing by leaps and bounds and becoming singularly focused on annihilating civilization, the Japanese government is preventing with what military power they might muster because the allies won't allow them to re-arm. Our hero has a series of further run-ins with the monster and endures further loss and trauma. Just when you think he might be about ready to step in front of a bus, his fellow veterans gather a last-ditch effort to fight but by the gods it doesn't look good.

Strongly recommended.

P.S. This is the first time I've tried to watch a movie in Japanese with my fledgling language skills and nothing more than a truly hare-brained translation service on my phone. It went .. okay.