Godzilla Minus One (2023)

Seventy years in, Godzilla has been a lot of things. A radioactive menace, a doting dad, a Roland Emmerich dinosaur stomping round Manhattan, and a Hollywood team player who tag-teams with King Kong. So how do you make him scary again? Takashi Yamazaki's answer is to take him back to 1945, drop him on a country that has already lost everything, and make him the worst thing that could possibly happen next. You've had nearly three years to see this one, but stick around anyway, because we've got thoughts. And now there's a sequel to check them against.

Godzilla Minus One lands in Japan on 3 November 2023, Godzilla Day, and in UK cinemas that December. Yamazaki writes, directs and supervises the effects on a budget reported at under $15 million. It goes on to take over $100 million worldwide, become the biggest Japanese Godzilla film ever made, and win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. We recorded this in early 2024, before that Oscar, which is why nobody mentions it.

Does Godzilla work better as the hero or the villain? For most of his seventy years he's been the good guy by default, because there's always a worse monster to fight. Hollywood's MonsterVerse went straight for team-ups and hollow earths. Minus One goes the other way. It lifts moments straight out of the 1954 original, from a commuter train in Godzilla's jaws to a scientist's plan to finish him off in the water, and builds everything around the people running from him. Because at the end of the day Godzilla is a giant lizard. He's not going to have a character arc.

In this episode we get into what the title actually means, Koichi's survivor's guilt and a world that keeps on ending, why Shin Godzilla got the bureaucracy right and the Godzilla a bit wrong, the scene that's basically Jaws, CGI versus a man in a suit, and an ending that sets up a sequel in the strangest possible way. With Godzilla Minus Zero in cinemas, we finally get to find out where it was going...

Stay off the rooftops, keep out of the underground, and settle in.

Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to know what we made of the sequel, our Godzilla Minus Zero episode is up on Patreon.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time. For more like this, dig into the back catalogue here at JourneyThroughSciFi.com or sign up to the JTSF Logbook newsletter