Godzilla Minus One (2023)
Godzilla has been stomping through Japanese cinema since 1954, when Ishiro Honda's original Gojira gave the world its most enduring monster metaphor. Born from the anxieties of a nation that had survived atomic devastation, the character has since accumulated thirty-odd official entries across Japanese and American productions, ranging from the genuinely unsettling to the cheerfully ridiculous (there is a film in which Godzilla fights a giant moth, and it is treated with complete sincerity). By the time the franchise rolled into the 2010s, Toho had largely ceded the international conversation to Legendary Pictures and their MonsterVerse, a polished but unremarkable run of Hollywood spectacles that prioritised scale over substance. Godzilla Minus One, released in Japan in November 2023 and internationally shortly after, is Toho's corrective. Set in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it plants the monster back in the soil it originally grew from, a ruined, exhausted Japan with nothing left to lose, and asks what a creature like this actually means when the people facing it are already living through something close to the end of the world.
Takashi Yamazaki is probably best known outside Japan for the Always: Sunset on Third Street trilogy, a warmly received series of period dramas built around meticulous visual reconstruction of postwar Tokyo. That background turns out to be exactly the right training ground for this project. He wrote, directed, and supervised the visual effects himself, which is a genuinely unusual arrangement for a production of this scale, and the results have been widely discussed in the industry for what they achieved on a reported budget somewhere in the region of fifteen million dollars. For context, that is a fraction of what most comparable Western productions spend before they've finished casting. The film is a Toho and Robot Communications co-production, and it arrived in the UK carrying the weight of considerable international buzz, a crop of awards nominations, and the kind of word-of-mouth that travels faster than any marketing campaign. It also follows a particularly strong year for ambitious Japanese cinema, including The Boy and the Heron, which suggests that 2023 was a good moment to be watching films that came out of Japan.
Leading the cast is Ryunosuke Kamiki as Koichi Shikishima, a former kamikaze pilot carrying a particular and quietly devastating guilt into the chaos of the postwar period. Kamiki has been working steadily in Japanese film and television since childhood, and he brings a kind of inward restraint to the role that suits the material well. Opposite him, Minami Hamabe plays Noriko, a young woman surviving on stubbornness and borrowed time, and she handles a fairly demanding emotional range with real confidence. The supporting players, including Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, and the always-reliable Hidetaka Yoshioka, fill out a cast that treats the human side of the story as seriously as the creature feature spectacle surrounding it. That commitment across the ensemble is worth noting, because it is exactly the kind of thing that separates a functional genre piece from something that actually lands. If you're interested in how Japanese cinema handles genre material with this sort of earnestness, our review of Casshern covers another ambitious, visually ambitious domestic production that attempted something similar, with rather more mixed results. For something at the more grounded, character-led end of Japanese genre filmmaking, there is also Salaryman worth a look.
When you buy a ticket for a Godzilla picture, you already know exactly what you’re getting. You’re there for the roaring, the stomping, and the spectacular destruction of Japanese infrastructure.
What Takashi Yamazaki has pulled off with 2023’s Godzilla Minus One is genuinely staggering, primarily because of the sheer visual fidelity on display. When you find out this was made on a comparatively tiny budget ($15mil I think), the jaw-dropping scale of the creature design and the city-leveling set pieces just doesn't seem to add up. It looks like a multi-hundred-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster, which is a cracking achievement in an era where studios throw cash at CGI that still looks like plastic.
But a giant radioactive lizard is only as good as the humans running away from it, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I actually cared about the people on screen. The acting across the board is remarkably decent, grounding the apocalyptic spectacle in genuine, lived-in emotion. Ryunosuke Kamiki, playing a guilt-ridden survivor, does a brilliant job of anchoring the human drama, giving the film a beating heart that so many entries in this franchise completely lack. Fair play to the cast for treating the material with such earnestness; they sell the terror and the tragedy so well that you forget you're watching a giant digital monster.
Because of this surprisingly strong emotional core, I have to admit this is easily the Godzilla film I’ve enjoyed the most. Usually, these movies are just loud, messy affairs that blur together into a two-hour headache. Minus One, however, actually takes the time to build a compelling, post-war narrative that makes the monster’s arrival feel like a genuine, terrifying escalation rather than just a scheduled nuisance. Yamazaki manages to balance the crushing weight of historical trauma with the unadulterated, popcorn-munching thrill of a giant monster brawl, and it works beautifully.
When the dust settles, this is a roaring triumph that proves you don't need an endless bank account to make a spectacular piece of blockbuster cinema. It delivers exactly the giant monster mayhem you paid for, but wraps it in a visually stunning, surprisingly moving package that elevates it above the usual kaiju fodder. Takashi Yamazaki has crafted a brilliant, highly entertaining spectacle that genuinely earns its critical acclaim.
Godzilla Minus One sits in an interesting position in the broader conversation about what blockbuster cinema can and should be. Its success, both critically and commercially, has given the industry something to point at when arguing that spectacle and sincerity are not mutually exclusive. Whether you arrive as a lifelong kaiju fan or a complete newcomer to the franchise, the film makes a reasonable case for itself on its own terms, mixing genre satisfaction with something that feels, for want of a less overused word, earned. It is not a reinvention of the monster movie so much as a reminder of what the monster movie was always supposed to be capable of. Sometimes the most effective thing a giant lizard can do is make you feel something. This one does.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-07-18
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Godzilla Minus One (2023) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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