Category Archives: Sci-Fi

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?

Fifteen years after Iron Man first made its bow in theaters, it’s safe to say that the superhero genre has mostly hit creative stagnation. Small-scale stories have been replaced by CGI-drenched battlefields intended to set up another decade of movies (Quantumania, looking at you), and a fixation with “multiverse” storytelling—admittedly a comic book mainstay—has robbed individual installments of any serious stakes. (After all, what does it matter if someone dies? You can always get them back from some reality or other.)

Given all that, I was pretty cynical heading into The Flash, which was widely billed as a reshuffle of the narrative cards to allow for James Gunn’s DC reboot. I’m not a fan of Gunn’s aesthetic sensibility—if Zack Snyder’s style trended Nietzschean, Gunn’s wallows in the grotesque—and expected The Flash to be little more than a cynical cash grab that left a bad taste behind.

Imagine my surprise, then, when The Flash turned out to be one of the best summer blockbusters in years. Somehow, it manages to be funny, heartfelt, and even awe-inspiring—a throwback to a time before the need for “connected universes” swamped the need for moral and metaphysical drama.

Picking up sometime after the events of Justice League, this installment finds the eponymous hero, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), struggling to balance superhero responsibilities with his quest to free his wrongfully convicted father from prison. With legal strategies running short, Barry hits on a dangerous idea: if he can step backwards in the flow of time far enough, he can change the past to stop his mother from being murdered and his father from being convicted in the first place. 

Of course, he tries precisely that, but the reality to which he returns is very different than he expected. There’s a younger version of himself (also Ezra Miller), who picks up super-speed powers of his own—but there’s also a strange dearth of the “metahumans” that populated Barry’s prior reality. Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and the rest are nowhere in sight.

Alas, those heroes will be sorely missed. As it happens, Barry has reentered the time-stream shortly before the events of Man of Steel, where Superman fought General Zod (Michael Shannon) to prevent the destruction of the planet. Zod promptly shows up, but in this reality there’s no Last Son of Krypton to oppose him: Barry has created a reality with supervillains, but no superheroes.

Fortunately, it’s not as if there’s no help to be found. Enter Michael Keaton, reprising his role as the 1990s-era Batman of Batman and Batman Returns. (Yes, it’s a nervy choice to revisit the character after Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, but let that slide.) After “old Barry” and “young Barry” manage to rouse him from his Howard Hughes-style isolation, the aging Bruce Wayne reactivates the old Batcave and prepares for battle. There’s no Superman in this reality, but there is a Supergirl (an impressive Sasha Calle), and just maybe this makeshift team will be able to go toe-to-toe with Zod.

The Flash was helmed by Andy Muschietti, the director behind It and It: Chapter Two, and it features all of his cinematic strengths and none of Gunn’s distinctive weaknesses. There’s a real sense of wonder onscreen (particularly once Supergirl shows up) and sheer joie de vivre that seems to have been lacking in so many franchise outings lately. Yes, the CGI is iffy—especially in the film’s third act, when it becomes distractingly poor—but this is forgivable enough given that the characters and story, rather than the spectacle, are the real attraction here.

And the characters and story are good enough that, despite all the whiz-bang that fills the screen by the end, The Flash is genuinely poignant. When all’s said and done, this is a story about accepting reality in its tragedy and in its beauty—about saying goodbye to loved ones and moving forward. 

In the current superhero storytelling environment, this is radical stuff. At the risk of moderate spoilers, Muschietti’s take on the “multiverse” is starkly different from Marvel’s—so different, in fact, that I hesitate to even use the same word. This multiverse operates according to a logic that is precisely the opposite of Marvel’s: where the Marvelverse allows tampering with timelines to get better outcomes—such as reversing Thanos’s famous snap—in Muschietti’s multiverse, some events are fixed. The hand of fate—or, one could say equally accurately, the hand of Providence—lies over all timelines, ordaining some outcomes and foreclosing others. While the precise way in which they happen might change, the events themselves must be.

(I can’t resist pointing out that this is an Interesting and compelling way of depicting the distinction between primary and secondary causality: the arrangement of affairs to produce certain particular results doesn’t turn everyone into puppets or deprive them of their agency—their “gnomic wills,” in theological terms.)

The upshot of all this is that characters’ lives and decisions matter—they can be consonant with this overarching plan, or can attempt to circumvent it. And efforts towards the latter, as the film’s third act makes clear, can lead to real horror (the phrase “metaphysical corruption” is particularly apt in one character’s case). This is more inventive and thought-provoking stuff than we’ve gotten from the genre in years.

At the time of this writing, The Flash was headed for box-office bomb territory, likely failing to earn back its massive budget. And this is a tremendous shame. Frankly, after the last few years of big-budget movies, I’d started to wonder whether I’d lost my sense of wonder—if somewhere along the moviegoing way, the thrill of big-screen adventure had just worn off.  The Flash convinced me otherwise. 

By a considerable margin, this is the best superhero flick since Avengers: Endgame. Highly recommended.