Typically, “Godzilla movie” is shorthand for spectacle. Nobody ever shows up to a kaiju flick for the compelling human drama: viewed in hindsight, Gareth Edwards’s attempt to flesh out his human characters in 2014’sGodzilla was ambitious, but ultimately less-than-successful. Audiences want big beasts.

And yet, Godzilla Minus One is somehow that strangest of things: a monster movie that would be intensely compelling even without a monster.

A post-WWII period piece, Minus One (directed by Takashi Yamazaki) follows the journey of Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a young fighter-pilot-turned-potential-kamikaze. Unwilling to die for a losing cause, Koichi feigns mechanical trouble and touches down on a remote Pacific island. That night, the repair base is attacked by a huge dinosaur-like creature—and again, Koichi is unable to fight back in the moment. He returns home in shame to a devastated Japan, where his family lies dead, and begins to scrape together a life. 

Eventually, Koichi falls in with fellow orphan Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and the baby she has adopted in turn, and they form a makeshift family. Koichi finds a job as a minesweeper off the Japanese coast, which pays well but carries major risk—risk of Godzilla, that is. Provoked by American atomic testing in the South Pacific, the titan soon emerges from the deep and heads for the Japanese coast, leaving devastation in its wake. Koichi, of course, must now fight to defend his home and loved ones.

Lacking any connection to Legendary Pictures’ “MonsterVerse” (which most recently gave us 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong), Minus One was produced and distributed by Toho, the Japanese production company originally responsible for the Godzilla character. (It’s entirely in Japanese with English subtitles, which adds to the authenticity.) And yet, while the film’s historical and geographic setting is deeply particular—bound up with painful memory—the themes here are universal in scope.

At its core, Minus One has a very simple message: it is good to live, and to endure. Sacrifice and courage do matter. Circumstances may call for them. But that does not obviate the reality that human beings, no matter what they face, also have a responsibility to the future.

If this is a “vitalistic” theme, it is also a sharp repudiation of any crypto-Heideggerian nihilism that would locate life’s meaning in its end. One recalls Achilles’s fateful choice in the Iliad between long life and undying glory:

Of course, Achilles chooses renown. And it is a decision that Achilles’s shade, drawn up from the bowels of Hades in the Odyssey, later comes to regret:

Don’t talk up death to me, illustrious Odysseus!
I’d rather work as a field hand, a hireling, for some other
landless man who could just scrape a livelihood together
than be lord over all the corpses who’ve ever perished!

This intuition is the heart of Minus One: that life is good, and worth living, and not to be thrown away fruitlessly. There is no glory in violent futility.

This is serious-minded stuff—as it should be—but Minus One isn’t so dour that it forgets to be an action film. Indeed, it’s because there’s emotional weight that the CGI carnage works. The action set pieces here were created for a fraction of the usual cost (the total Minus One budget has been reported as $15 million, less than a tenth of the price of a standard summer tentpole) but look spectacular, especially a sequence in which Godzilla rampages through the city of Ginza, demolishing buildings in every direction. They are doubly successful because they feature characters who matter—whom the audience has actually had time to get to know.  (It also helps that the chaos is cleanly filmed, without massive dust clouds or herky-jerky camera work.)

Ultimately, as an action film, Minus One manages to capture the intensely melodramatic energy of 1990s-era studio epics like Armageddon or Independence Day. To be clear, this is a plus. Those movies were beloved at the time and are still widely watched today. But it’s a resemblance that underscores an important point: Minus One feels like the sort of movie American studios were once capable of making, yet somehow lack the wherewithal to produce today. And that, in turn, invites the question: Why? What went wrong?

Here’s a thought: actual emotion in the context of big-budget action is mostly gone, perhaps out of a misplaced fear of being thought corny. In its place is an endless sequence of quips and one-liners, which work as laugh lines but end up gutting the film’s narrative heft. Everyone knows now that the wisecracking hero will make it out alive—and so will his loved ones. 

To its great credit, Minus One takes an older and wiser approach. Anyone can die—but also, anyone can live. Sometimes they must.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that, Godzilla: Minus One is probably the best monster film in years—if not decades. It is a triumph on a scale that should make every Hollywood studio executive profoundly uncomfortable: where, exactly, are all those hundreds of millions of budgeted dollars going?