1. A foreign film: Godzilla Minus One (2023)

List Progress: 2/12

It takes a special kind of monster movie to make the parts without the monster interesting. But 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, the thirty-seventh film to feature the titular kaiju Godzilla, tells a deeply human story about loss, grief, shame and hope. But it is not a drama with a monster slapped onto it either; Godzilla embodies everything that happened to Japan in World War II, and it and the human characters’ existences are deeply intertwined. This is a raw, beautiful story that gets to the very heart of what Godzilla has always been about.

Set in 1945, Godzilla Minus One follows kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima, who was set to fly a suicide mission but faked that his plane was faulty at the last minute. Between that and an early encounter with Godzilla, he is burdened with an extreme amount of survivors’ guilt when returning to Tokyo, scarred by air raids. He stumbles into a family relationship with lone woman Noriko and orphaned baby Akiko, and tries to build a life for them all in the wreckage. He gets a job on a mine-sweeping boat, which puts him on the front lines when the newly-mutated Godzilla emerges. The nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll has turned Godzilla from a simple local monster to an eldritch beast, and now Tokyo is right in the path of its destruction. Kōichi and several other former-military men have to come together to protect their homes when the US, Soviet and Japanese governments have all left them to die.

Director Takashi Yamazaki is not especially subtle with the messaging of Godzilla Minus One, but it is a level of nuance that is lacking from so many monster movies. This is a movie with a small and personal enough scope that every appearance of the beast feels tense and suspenseful. The audience is not waiting for the thrill of mass destruction, but hoping that baby Akiko will survive and have a loving family. Military planes are not flown in droves by faceless figures, but by an individual, traumatized yet hopeful, man. Putting both the fear and the love into a kaiju movie is a difficult task, but one that Godzilla Minus One achieves with aplomb.

Would I Recommend It: Yes. And in theaters if possible, to appreciate the sense of scale.