Jaicee said:
You're very kind. I discovered Godzilla back in first grade, in 1988, when a Japanese-American kid named Art who happened to be in my class told me about it after I mentioned that I liked dinosaurs. He made Godzill sound so cool. My mom got me a Godzilla vs. Megalon from the local video store just as a random pick after I shared my interest with her, which turned out to be the perfect entry for someone my age. It's one of the dumbest entries in the whole franchise and the dubbing in English is comically bad, but I was too young to notice. It had lots of super-cool kaiju action and that's what mattered to me, lol, although I do remember being upset when poor Godzilla got bloodied by Gigan. That scared me. Nonetheless I got over it and soon wound up pressuring my best friend at the time, Casey, into pretending to be Jet Jaguar as I play-acted the role of Godzilla whilst we did repeat viewings. I think my heat breath imitation was pretty spot-on if I do say so myself. (I was such a girly-girl, no? ) From there it was on to the more recent and serious picture, Godzilla 1985 (as The Return of Godzilla was known Stateside). Definitely a scarier movie that made me like Godzilla himself less since he wasn't the good guy this time around, but I got used to it in time and stopped caring whether he was good or not in these films, ha! When you're a little kid, you're shorter than most everybody and you don't have much control over your life. One can very much yearn to be taller and powerful. Eventually I accrued all but I think four of the movies on VHS, but it was the DVD re-releases in the early 2000s that made it possible for me to finally finish out my collection and get fully up to speed. Re-watching everything at that point in life gave me a different perspective on the franchise. I started noticing the social commentary in the films more and relating to the human characters in some of the more serious movies more. I would say that my interest in some of the kiddier entries from the late '60s and '70s especially diminished a lot, but y'know, childhood nostalgia is still a thing after all. Anyway yeah, I've followed the Godzilla movies now for just about my whole life. That kinda began as an extension of my childhood interest in dinosaurs and ultimately transformed into an interest in what this creature has meant to the people of Japan. This is a B-movie franchise for the most part, let's face it, but Godzilla Minus One is not. This is the kind of movie that has real award-winning potential, I would go as far as to say. Frankly, all the actors in this movie do an incredible job, but Ryunosuke Kamiki in particular brought an exceptional and highly convincing passion to his role as Koichi, I thought. Just the way he cries and howls and crawls around on the ground at different points in the film have a raw emotional power that transferred the magnitude of his suffering directly to my heart. "My war is not over yet" was one of the most truthful and affecting lines in the film. There was a moment toward the end of the picture where... Spoiler! ...it seemed like the cost of defeating Godzilla had been both Noriko and Koichi, among our named characters, leaving Akiko an orphan. I was so depressed in that moment. It momentarily felt like this whole movie was completely pointless. There had been this rousing speech about how the country has treated life too cheaply and then...this; this as the conclusion? No. Something had to give here. And then you see him parachuting down and you're like "FUCK YEAH!!!" And then, in a surprise I truly wasn't expecting, Noriko turned out to be alive too! I was admittedly annoyed that they seemed to fridge her earlier, but the poetic moment where she asks Koichi if his war is over now was 100% worth the conceit.
Many accolades are deserved here. |
Nice. :)
I became a fan at 13 or 14; I started studying Japanese at school and my Dad started taping any Japanese movies that were on TV as a way to help me practice, and one night Godzilla vs Destoroyah was on; I was instantly hooked!
And yeah, in a series of mostly fun B movies, Minus One is really something else, a genuinely great piece of cinema.
The acting, the music, the direction, the writing, it's all great stuff. Even the effects work is astounding good for a film that cost just $15 million to make; less than 10% of the recent Hollywood Godzilla flicks due to Japan's film industry being a fraction the size of the US.