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Rome, 16 June – It is now available on Netflix Godzilla minus one new iteration of the franchise of the progenitor of the kaijuthe Japanese monsters. Reboot of the origins of the canonical monster set in Tokyo between 1946 and 1947 after a brief background in the last days of the Second World War. A blockbuster film at home, which also proved itself at the international box office. But Godzilla minus one it’s also something else. Even though it is a “giant monster movie” the director and screenwriter Takashi Yamazaki works on two levels, on the one hand the “canon of kaiju” the monster films that would become one of the first symbols of the rebirth of post-war Japan. On the other hand, he approaches the setting with the attitude of a historian.
On the other hand, Yamazaki is a specialist, he created the trilogy of Always — Sunset on Third StreetJapan’s fresco of economic growth since the late 1950s, The Great War of Archimedesabout the making of the iconic battleship YamatoAnd The eternal Zeroabout the rediscovery by two twenty-year-olds of their grandfather, a pilot kamikaze. 2013 film based on a 2006 novel which had attracted much controversy for its nationalism and the figure of kamikaze perceived as too glorified.
The last job
Godzilla minus one for Yamazaki it becomes a way to address many of the themes of his cinema by reflecting on national history: on the first, nationalist and militarist Japan, and then, the Japan of the economic boom. And doing so with one of the symbols of post-war Japanese cinema. A philological operation that also led to the release of a black and white edition of the film Godzilla Minus One/Minus Coloralso distributed in the United States.
Godzilla against (fake) neorealism?
From a metacinematic point of view Godzilla minus one and its location on a historical and cultural level can also represent food for thought on our cinema. On the other hand, the Italian blockbuster of 2023 is also a film set in the immediate post-war period, 1948, which stylistically refers to the main genre of Italian post-war cinema, namely neorealism.
Naturally we talk about There’s still tomorrowthe pseudo-neorealist blockbuster of Paola Cortellesi. Is Godzilla minus one That There’s still tomorrow they are a metahistorical reflection on one’s national history and how it is told. Godzilla against neorealism, and inevitably the post-war Japanese of the absolute fiction of the monster film are more plausible (and historically reliable) than the 1948 Italians of Paola Cortellesi’s fake neorealism.
They poured over Paola Cortellesi’s film rivers of ink on the topic of patriarchy in the Italy of yesterday and today and on the vote for women for the constituent assembly. The film itself is also successful, the final twist where it is discovered that the protagonist is not trying to escape from her violent husband with an old love, but rather she simply wants to go to the polls for the constituent assembly was liked by the public and works. Thus the comic timing of many of the gags.
Yet it has significant limits, starting from being a strange hybrid between drama and comedy, and from the fact that the “red herring” to mislead the viewer does not stand up to a second viewing, so approximate and contradictory are the false clues that the screenplay proposes. As the concierge’s contempt shows when she delivers the letter with the electoral card to the protagonist. Contempt that makes the viewer delude itself into thinking that it is a love letter, yet the same letter was reasonably delivered to all the voting age people in the building. Why the contempt? Just to mislead the viewer.
Or the questionable choice to resolve the daughter’s promise of marriage by blowing up the future groom’s bar with a bomb placed there by a US soldier, almost a reference to Gladio and the strategy of tension. Yet, despite these discoveries and related moments of disbelief (other than monsters in Tokyo bay) There’s still tomorrow it was welcomed by audiences and critics as a realistic cross-section of the Italy that once was.
Science fiction Japanese better than “delusionally correct” Italians
More credible (net of a couple of gimmicks) the defeated Japanese Godzilla minus one and the contradictions of post-war Japan.
The protagonist is a former pilot kamikaze survived the mission by boasting of a technical problem. Twice cowardly, also because perhaps he could have done something against a still infant Godzilla (not yet become a giant monster after the radiation from the atomic bombs). His return home is among the rubble of a destroyed Tokyo, rubble where even humanity seems lost among the miseries. The neighbor who treats him with contempt considering him the cause of Japan’s defeat: he has returned unlike his relatives, a sign that he did not fight enough. And while the protagonist tries to rebuild his life, and little by little the houses begin to take the place of the miserable shacks, the monster arrives to destroy Tokyo again.
When Godzilla arrives, the Japanese think they can rely on the United States, who refuse to intervene fearing an escalation with the Soviet Union. At that point a scientist and an admiral will have to recruit Navy veterans for an almost certainly suicidal mission against the kaiju. One of the most successful moments of the film, where an attempt is made to combine the past and future of a nation.
On the one hand, the reflection on the defeat and on the action of the commanders in defiance of the lives of their own men. On the other hand, the need to ask for a new sacrifice from them in what the scientist slyly defines as the “battle for the future”.
Japanese rhetoric, it may be said, is also a way of attempting a reconciliation between the spirit of that war and that defeat and what would come afterwards. It is impossible to make a clear break or to pretend that that story never happened. You are still children and grandchildren of those men who fought on the wrong side. Here’s the difference between a film like Godzilla minus one and ours fiction where the fascist on duty can only be a speck, or secretly and convincingly anti-fascist. And so in one fiction Bottai is the ur-fascist who spies on Marconi, while in another fiction he is more or less convincingly anti-fa.
For many Godzilla minus one it’s just a movie “nationalist”, and some Japanese critics looked at it with suspicion as The Eternal Zero. More simply, it is a good film, as demonstrated by the box office takings in the United States.
On the sidelines, a final metacinematographic note of comparison between Italy and Japan, always inspired by Godzilla minus one. Deus ex technological the presence of a Kyushu J7W fighter in the film Shinden, late Japanese attempt to build a high-altitude interceptor to counter US B-29s. A museum replica was created for the film and promptly displayed at the Tachiarai Peace Memorial Museum in Fukuoka. Of course a plane is not a submarine, yet one might wonder what happened to the replica of the Caps made for the film Commander and of which a museum display was being mooted.
One more reason to learn from the Japanese. And in the meantime, between Godzilla and our local fake-neorealism, the verdict is certain.
Flavio Bartolucci
