Godzilla Minus One Does Something Very Differently From Other Kaiju Movies

“Godzilla Minus One” focuses on Koichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who returns home after the end of World War II. He struggles with survivor’s guilt, as well as having faked an engine malfunction to avoid fulfilling the role of a kamikaze. In the film, the heroes are not decorated commanders or big personalities, but losers — literally. Most of the first act of the film is spent exploring how devastated Japan was after WWII, focusing on battered people trying to rebuild their homes from the wreckage of a firebombed Tokyo. 

They’re at their lowest trying to rebuild, and the audience knows things will go from bad to worse. For Koichi, rebuilding means creating a makeshift home with a young woman and an orphaned baby girl she’s adopted as her own. There’s no space for romance or downtime — survival is all that matters. By focusing on Koichi and his band of misfit co-workers, who clear naval mines and struggle to adapt to their new reality, we care about them long before Godzilla arrives in Tokyo ready to destroy everyone.

Though still a movie about a giant monster destroying the city, “Godzilla Minus One” is also blatantly an anti-war movie. Koichi’s arc is one about deprogramming, going from shame of not fulfilling his job as a suicide pilot to recognizing that shouldn’t have been a job at all. When the movie introduces other soldiers willing to take the fight to Godzilla, they are not some hardened veterans. Instead, they are people who are shell-shocked, traumatized, and angry at how their government threw them into the grinder with zero regard for their lives.