Godzilla Minus One (2023)

I've never been a big fan of Godzilla movies - to be fair I haven't seen a lot of them, but they tend to suffer from the same problem. Godzilla is awesome and people suck, so putting Godzilla in your film and then asking me to care about people is just asking too much of me.

Godzilla Minus One is no different in that respect - Godzilla is awesome, people pretty much suck, yet the film spends most of its time trying to make me care about the pathetic humans. Nope.

Still, given this obvious limitation, Godzilla Minus One does about as well as it could reasonably be expected to. The film confronts the war in a way that Japanese films generally don't (i.e. directly), depicting the hardships of life after a devastating defeat quite matter-of-factly.

There's too much "aren't people good, eh?"... I couldn't help doing some maths and thinking that little Akiho can look forward to a future as a sukeban girl in the 1970's, which neutered the attempts to find or pluck my heart strings.

The film introduces Godzilla early and dramatically, and escalates the creature with each new encounter, culminating in a genuinely awe-inspiring creature by the finale.

Overall this was a good effort to reboot or rebase the franchise, and I look forward to seeing how they number the sequels.