In his busy holiday, I’ve made some time for movies. Here’s my thoughts on what I’ve seen.
Godzilla Minus One
There is really not much other way to say this: this is the best Godzilla movie ever made, and I don’t know that we even have a close second.
Why? Because they used the monster with actual pacing in a way that built suspense around his every appearance, and managed to make the film about the people and characters and plot without taking it away from the Big G in doing it.
The movie starts towards the end of World War II, with a guy who was slated to die as a kamikaze pilot — Koichi Shikihima by name — decides he’s not actually willing to die for a hopeless cause, and feigns problems with his plane in order to land on one of the remaining Japanese outpost islands. There, he’s left to witness a comparatively infant Godzilla come ashore and kill basically the entire airfield crew on the island, after he freezes from panic at a critical moment when he was told to use his plane’s gun on the beast. Godzilla was big enough it probably wouldn’t have killed him anyway, so the moment of fear likely saves Shikishima’s life. However, the survivor’s guilt and the cultural dishonor associated with refusing his dubious duty as a kamikaze pilot followed by his moment of self preserving cowardice afterwards leaves him deeply ashamed of himself when he returns to Tokyo after the war.
Japan itself is completely wrecked, and Shikishima learns that his parents didn’t survive the bombing raids. He finds himself taking in an attractive young woman named Noriko, whose parents also died in the bombing, and who has adopted a baby girl from a mother who also died. They wind up making up an awkward family by convenience, where they effectively become to the parents to this orphaned child that doesn’t belong to either of them biological, but comes to regard the two of them as her mommy and daddy. As they start to reassemble themselves, Shikishima takes a job clearing remaining sea mines from the war because it’s the best work available, and Noriko worries that he’s got a death wish due to his survivor’s guilt and won’t come back.
They encounter Godzilla at sea. The US’ nuclear weapons tests at Bikini have mutated the monster, as we all knew it would, and it’s much bigger and meaner now. This escalates to a place where Shikishima gets ashore to find Noriko, who is apparently killed saving him when Godzilla reveals that his atomic breath in this movie lights up like an actual low yield nuclear device.
The background undertones of the movie are very anti-nuclear and anti-war, making very clear that no faith in the wartime and postwar Japanese governments can be meaningfully justified. The latter is a necessary device to permit the movie to even be marketable overseas, of course, but it’s sincere nonetheless.
Various people come up with plans to try to kill people. One of Shikishima’s crew mates from the minesweeper expedition turns out to be a bit of a scientist, and he comes up with a plan to use freon coolants and fast-inflating life rafts to sink Godzilla and then raise him up from enough ocean depths that the rapidly changing pressures would kill him. Shikishima has his own plan: he digs up the last surviving mechanic from the island he finished the war on to rig up an experimental military plane to help the effort, but he also secretly asks that it be built as a kamikaze plane as well. With nothing he feels he has left to live for — he admits to falling in love with Noriko but could never bring himself to marry her because his own personal war wasn’t still over, and he reasons that their orphan child will be better off with a neighbor than with him by himself — he plans to hit Godzilla in the mouth after observing that the mines seemed to hurt him more from that area than naval weapons did.
It comes down to the end before we find that, when he flies the plane into the beast’s mouth to kill it (for now), his compatriot has given him an ejection seat and insists that rather than going to die, he should strive to live. Shikishima takes this as forgiveness, and does so. Then, when he comes back, having sent his neighbor a note to take care of his adoptive daughter, the neighbor is weeping as she bops him with a notification that Noriko survived the earlier Godzilla-induced atomic blast. Noriko, knowing his torment by now, asks him if his war is finally over, and he tearfully tells her that it is. It’s implied that they’ll finally get married and be happy.
…except that Godzilla isn’t really dead.
The end.
This was easily the most human story of any Godzilla movie I’ve ever seen. Before, they’d have some human interaction, but the people were usually just vocal spectators, except for truly weird movies like Godzilla vs Megalon, where they kept toys that came to life to help in the kaiju fights. This was the first one where the plot of the humans came first and the monsters actually came second, yet without shoving Godzilla entirely to the background.
Rating: 4 out of 5 (Excellent, and will likely stay rewatchable)
Rebel Moon Part One
This could be accused of being a Star Wars knockoff, although it actually draws from other things as well. There is an obvious rebels versus the Empire Motherworld backdrop to the plot, mixed with a bit of Seven Samurai sort of ensemble cast (albeit with an obvious Han Solo like rogue pilot who apparently wants to be a good guy), mixed in turn with a clear Thanos-Gamora relationship between Kora and the usurping Regent of the Motherworld. It’s directed by Zack Snyder, so there will be plenty of melodramatic slowdown involved.
The main twists are that the Han Solo figure really is a rogue and sells them out, and the implication that reads rather strongly like, “who has a greater right to kill Thanos than Gamora?”
It’s part one of two. It was entertaining enough. Not as good as the better Star Wars movies, but better than the weaker ones.
Rating: 3.25 out of 5 (Good, but not necessarily a classic)
Black Swan
Finally got around to watching this. No real point in recap, other than to say it was rather disturbing in its own ways, but I’m not sure how rewatchable this one is, either.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 (Pretty good)
Fifty Shades of Grey
I decided to watch this one out of morbid curiosity. I’m not really into BDSM, but even if I was, I’m not sure I would’ve been all that impressed with this. There was almost no real plot other than Christian Grey wanting to tie up and bone Anastasia Steele, and her being vaguely tempted to let him. There’s basically nothing else to the entire movie.
Grey comes off as entitled and creepy. Steele comes off as naive yet apparently is supposed to be smart, too, but has plenty of convenient knowledge about what everything he brings up means even though she’s a virgin going into the movie.
The BDSM scenes are fairly soft core, so if getting your kink on is the point you’re watching this movie for, you may as well just go to PornHub. And there frankly isn’t enough to the non sexual parts to be worth watching it for either. I almost stopped about halfway through and had to kind of convince myself to finish it. It didn’t really get better.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (It’s a Hollywood quality production, but a pretty bad and trashy one. Unless you’re really hankering for a guilty pleasure, I’d avoid, and even if you are, there’s better ways to do it.)
Red Cliff
A historical drama about the real life Battle of Red Cliffs from just prior to the Three Kingdoms era of Chinese history. There’s quite a few quite high end actors, including Tony Leung and Lin Chi-ling, who’s simply one of the more gorgeous Asian actresses I’ve ever seen and gets billed as a historical beauty who distracts the malevolent Cao Cao long enough for his enemies to capitalize.
The actual historical battle led to the continuation of a disunified China at the end of the Han Dynasty and is considered one of the more famous battles of ancient Chinese history. The film is mostly about the shenanigans and politics of Cao Cao and his enemies maneuvering to deal with one another, and the battle scenes are a combination of clever renditions of ancient warfare mixed with a bit of unrealistic but aesthetically pleasing hero fights. It was plenty entertaining.
Rating: 3.25 out of 5 (Fairly good)
Thanks for reading.
Musings of a Geekzer 