Kendra Coffey

Gozilla Minus One is a knockout masterpiece, it left me shaken by how incredible it was. I am for one, not a major Godzilla fan, I went because my husband wanted to see it. I expected to see a fairly average but entertaining movie of destruction without much substance. I was incredibly mistaken as this was up there in one of the most emotionally moving pieces of art I have ever seen. Let's be clear, this is not just a good movie, this movie is art. It feels like the kind of movie someone will be writing papers on in 100 years to study why this movie was so excellent. What made it so good? This movie understood that you have to authentically care about the characters. Today's movies fall flat, and this has been a trend for about the past 20 years where the characters seem more and more soulless. This is something I have noticed in all kinds of movies and TV shows, doesn't matter if it's American, Japanese, or some other country. A lot of shows and movies are clearly made by folks who have no depth of character themselves, and it shows in the works. This movie had characters with very real problems. At no point did it feel campy. They couched this whole surreal situation of a big monster in a very real, very grounded problem that it universally understood: how does one move on after war? It is a movie just as much about the psychological damage of war and the disappointment in oneself and one's friends and family upon the soldier as it is a movie about a big monster. I think it worked because WW2 as a war was such a BIGGER and SCARIER monster than Godzilla that Godzilla now seems in comparison less of a threat. Without giving away too much of the plot, I could reason to say that Godzilla in this movie almost came across like he was just one more war the Japanese felt they needed to sacrifice themselves for, like they already had to rectify their country asked them to die and they lost, now they have a big monster to fight? Is it even that big of a deal when the Americans quite for real killed most of their family members? It's not unreasonable. That's truly horrifying stuff to come to terms with. That's why this works. All the issues are very real and you feel every bit of it. You see the impact the war had on the Japanese, issues of dead family members, orphaned children, and veterans who seem to be suffering from a kind of PTSD and guilt. It's a perfect movie in so many ways. I didn't even get into the effects and how good it looked because the writing is the star of this movie.