KWIF: Godzilla Minus One (+3)

 KWIF = Kent's Week(ish) in Film

This Week:
Godzilla Minus One (2023, d. Takashi Yamzaki  - Imax)
Diabolik (2021, d. The Manetti Bros. - AmazonPrime)
Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire (2023, d. Zack Snyder - Neftlix)
Leave the World Behind (2023, d. Sam Esmail - Netflix)

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If you've paid any attention to the blog in the past month (and if you're reading this now, most assuredly you have), you know I'm in the middle of a Godzilla kick, having recently just finished watching all the Showa-era Toho-produced films. 

So I was very, very hyped to see not only that there was a brand new Godzilla film in theatres, but that it was getting absolutely rave reviews and topping the box office...in America.

There's something thrilling about the meta context a genre picture that resonates with both fans and critics, and beyond that, a foreign film that the public is willing to see. [Of course, we're in the second generation now of kids who have been raised on Anime and Manga, so there's almost no barrier to entry for them with a Japanese movie at this stage.]

Godzilla Minus One is a modern retelling of Godzilla. The "minus one" of the title is a reference to Japan already being at "zero" post World War II (given the devastation American forces wrought upon their country), and then as fallout from all of that, Godzilla strikes. 

Where prior Godzilla films that ape or reboot the original went more macro, dealing with the bureaucracy of fighting a kaiju, Godzilla Minus One goes micro, focusing in on a very human story. 

The film's protagonist, Kōichi, was a kamikaze pilot at the tail-end of WWII. As he is deployed on sortie he fakes engine trouble and lands at the repair base on Odo Island. While he is there, a young, recently awakened Godzilla attacks, and perhaps being the only person who can help, Kōichi freezes up when he is needed.

One of two survivors, Kōichi, returns to Tokyo to his devastated home. His parents are dead from the bombings. He is doubly shamed for not fulfilling his mission or helping fight the beast, and wracked with grief. He suffers from both depression and PTSD. 

Out in the market, he meets a young woman who has turned to shoplifting to feed an orphaned baby.  Kōichi takes them in and over time, they are a unit, although Kōichi is still too burdened by his past to see any future for this woman and child. He gets a job exploding the thousands of mines in the seas, where a few weeks in he and his crew have an encounter with a much, much larger Godzilla.  The creature is awake, and ready to claim its territory.

Due to rising tensions between Russia and America, neither will assist in fighting this creature whose powers of devastation have never been rendered so potently. The Japanese government is prohibited from any formal military engagement of the creature, so it's left to a civil unit of citizens, mostly ex-Navy, with Kōichi their only pilot, to take on the creature with very last ditch plans.  Kōichi for his part, intends to atone for his past.

I said while watching the Showa-era Godzilla films that the best of them are the ones where there's a human story behind it, or at the very least, compelling human characters. Godzilla Minus One has both, and focuses more on its characters than any Godzilla film I've seen so far. 

Kōichi is an incredibly flawed hero, and often not heroic at all. It's what makes him so compelling to watch. Genuine care and attention is put into his experiences shaping him, and into the relationships he builds with his partner, his child, even his neighbour and his mine-diffusing crew. Every encounter with Godzilla, while not at all a personal attack by the creature, is very personal to Kōichi, to the point that the film establishes a credibly solid link between him and the beast. Ryunosuke Kamiki who plays Kōichi is a likeable lead probably the weakest part of the entire film, though. He goes melodramatic in his performance way too often when I think a subtler touch would have been more fitting, but this could be cultural differences in what constitutes an effective emotional performance.  

Godzilla is used sparingly, but more effectively than in any Godzilla film in the past. Every instance of the creature seems timed perfectly. Heck, there were time where I was so wrapped up in the human drama, I was surprised by the reminder that, oh yeah, Godzilla's in this too. 

In the Showa era, Godzilla gets pretty silly. He goes from villain, to anti-hero, to good guy, to child icon over those 15 films, and at times is dancing or doing wrestling taunts. It's easy to forget Godzilla was supposed to be scary. In Godzilla Minus One, he is fucking scary. My heart was literally racing every time he was on screen (meanwhile my ears were bleeding). When Godzilla unleashes his atomic breath, it's one of the most sobering scenes in a blockbuster film ever. Just incredible.

Godzilla is a CGI creature in this film, which reportedly only cost around 15 million US to make. The Japanese filmmaking industry is apparently more efficient but also less salary driven, so people get paid a living wage but are not at a premium like most of the related industry in America.  Regardless, it's still an astonishing movie for the price.  The creature looks best in water, as when we see him full-body on land, he looks somewhat robotic in movement.

I saw Godzilla Minus One in IMAX, and not only was the picture big, but so was the sound. It was so loud that I believe I have suffered increased hearing damage as a result (two weeks later, my ears are still ringing...louder than they were ringing before). I was not the only one plugging my ears often in the theatre. 

This was, to put it bluntly, and incredibly refreshing film, both from a blockbuster standpoint and a Godzilla standpoint. It's amusing that within days of seeing the film, the trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire came out and it looks insanely silly by comparison...like the two should not be co-existing.  But such is the nature of Godzilla, where he can be used for potent allegories about Nuclear proliferation, historical trauma, or environmental devastation, or he can be used for the most mindless of entertainment and cheapest of thrills.

Great stuff. It's being re-released in January in a director-initiated, completely reconstructed black-and-white version. I'll be seeing it again, for sure.

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I love Mario Bava's Danger:Diabolik, like, a lot. It's a visual triumph and just a delightful pulp adventure. I realize Diabolik has a much larger life in comics and as a cultural touchstone in Italy, but they've never been readily available in English so I can't exactly say how or if Bava's vision of the character skews away from the comics. But if this new 2021 Diabolik (the first of a trilogy, which just debuted its third piece in November this year) is any indication, Bava wasn't far off the mark.

Unless the Manetti Bros. are taking direct inspiration from Bava than from the comics. I can't say.

Within the opening moments of Diabolik the titular character, in escaping the polizia who have the alley blocked off, presses a button and a section of the road raises up on hydrolics, and his Jaguar jumps over the patrol car in a very goofy, but practical, effects sequence. The Manetti Bros. with this moment, announce the tone of the film is, indeed, indebted to its comic book origins, and that you can't really take it as serious as its heavy shadows and even heavier score of haunting, ominous stings imply. 

The crux of the film is an origin story not for Diabolik, but instead his long-time paramour Eva Kant, and how they came to be together. It's completely a noir-inspired production... at least for its first two acts, and then utterly flips genres in its third act, becoming a heist film.

Given that this film retains a 1960s setting, it's hard for me not to compare this against Bava's original, and to conclude that it's nowhere near as stylish, nor is it as outright comic-booky. Diabolik's comic bookishness is intact, but more subtle. The film is striving to be something ... well, not more, but something else.

It's an enjoyable production, but I had to acclimatize myself to it. It's a little idiosyncratic, a little flimsy in characterization, and more than a little overlong at 2h13, and Diabolik is a really, really bad person as opposed to a deviously likeable anti-hero. The insight into how he handles his relationships prior to Eva are uncomfortably problematic...you know on top of being a murderer and a thief, he's a gaslighting, emotionally controlling partner. That Eva is invested in him speaks to her intelligence and boredom in life. She plays games in spheres that cause her trouble but she learns quickly to find routes out of them. A criminal career is kind of a logical next step. Its clear to see what he sees in her, both as one who challenges him and intrigues him, but what she sees in him is less specific except the attraction of a challenge, to learn something new.

If this trilogy starts with Eva wanting to be with Diabolik, it should end with her being Diabolik. Miriam Leone, who plays Eva, is a real winner in the role. You're never entirely certain what she's thinking as a character, which is entirely the point. She's elusive and alluring and not afraid of anything.  I was less sold on Luca Marinelli as Diabolik, he's not very fun. I see he's been recast for the subsequent two films (there's definitely an in-story reason as to why that is, but I wonder if there's a meta story for it). 

I don't know that this is anything above-par that will create new Diabolik fans, but if you're a Diabolik fan already, it's great just to see him back on screen.

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If there's two thing to know going into this first installment of Rebel Moon, it's that it's director's Zack Snyder's repurposing of a failed Star Wars pitch and that it's structured around the basic plot of The Seven Samurai. 

Oh, wait, you don't need to know either of those things going in, you will figure them out soon enough.

I don't hate Zack Snyder. He seems like a nice guy. He's got a great eye for composition. But he's an awful storyteller, he lacks any ability to inspire awe and wonder as he always strives to weigh everything down with unearned emotion. I think Snyder would be a great photographer, or commercial director, or music video director. After 15 years of Snyder movies, of which only one (the zombie one written by James Gunn) I would call "good", I'm more than certain this field of filmmaking is not really suited for him.

Rebel Moon is uninspired and worse, direly boring. It runs 45 minutes before it gets to the crux of the film, which is putting the band together, and then spends over an hour doing that, before it abruptly comes to a head, remembering that it doesn't have a 4 hour run-time.  

The assembling of the band of "heroes" entails four different encounters with almost complete strangers each given a chance to prove themselves either by words or by deeds, all of which feels like stalling for time rather than character development. They are barely archetypes, nevermind people who we like, care about or are curious to spend any more time with.

The third act is just a compressed 20-minute action set-piece that holds no emotional weight and is of zero consequence to whatever Part 2 is going to be about. To spoil it, the small band that just got together are betrayed (which was telegraphed seemingly 90 minutes earlier) and then almost entirely quashed by the space Nazis (and there's no subtlety to them being space Nazis) before it becomes an utterly nonsensical shootout and our small band triumph with some wounds the need licking. It's to prove that, yes, this band of heroes can make a difference, but it's only by the sheer stupidity of the storytelling that they do. 

It's a purposeless, nonsense film. We already have a Star Wars-inspired retelling of The Seven Samurai in Battle Beyond the Stars, a Roger Corman production that somehow is utterly cheaper in production value but has twice as much charisma (it's still a bad movie, but less bad than Rebel Moon).  This feels like a Uwe Boll film but if he got a talented cinematographer. 

Rebel Moon, more like Rebel Moof!

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Leave the World Behind is a film that warns of being nostalgic for a time that never existed (a comment mades about Friends, a show the younger daughter in the iflm is obsessed with). It's a trap that happens to far too many as they age and grow bitter at the changing world and the youth slated to inherit it. It's also a film that warns of complacency and the infecting WASP-y tendency to wave away warning signs, to override the gut instinct and insist everything is fine, when clearly it is not.

Julia Roberts is our lead here, playing a burned-out Brooklyn-dwelling mother and marketing executive who has grown weary and disillusioned with people. She books a last-minute Air B&B and hauls her husband, Ethan Hawke, and two teen kids out to a beautiful house upstate. It would be tremendously easy to say she's a real Karen, but it's not about entitlement, it's really about hating her life and the world around her. She's gone full pessimist and thinks the worst of everyone.

They're having a passively decent time until they're on the beach an an oil tanker grounds itself before them. Then Mahershala Ali and his college-aged daughter, Myha'la Herrold, show up at the door in formal wear, announcing that it's their home and asking to stay the night in the basement en suite. Roberts is evilly unconvinced by them, while Hawke wants to be nothing more than accommodating.  There's an undercurrent of racial tension in the situation, because it's America, so of course there is.  Esmail undercuts this tension, at least for the audience, by letting us in on Ali and Herrold's conversations, knowing they're telling the truth, and leaving Roberts exposed in the subsequent scenes where she's still being judgemental and confrontational.

Everything begins escalating around them, though, as information just dribbles out and scenes and signs become more and more ominous.

It is a film at its most effectively disturbing and distressing when it's being opaque about what's going on. Full of potent imagery that's handled by the performers just a little too calmly, the tension in the film is in the not knowing why, and so every little dribble of insight (yet revealing nothing) ratchets up that intensity.  

But it goes from subtle to blunt very quickly during its third act. Until then it's focused on delivering an intense scenario that could have multiple allegories applied (it could be an environmental allegory, it could be talking about societal decay and distrust of one's neighbours, it could be a critique on our dependency on the internet nut just personally but for infrastructure, or hell, at one point I wondered if it was just an alien invasion) and instead settles for just one definite answer which seems to me to be the wrong play (but may be a result of adaptation from the novel by Rumaan Alam or it may be Sam Esmail's invention). 

I can't really speak to Sam Esmail's track record. I watched Season 1 of Mr. Robot. I thought it was great, but I didn't need any more of it. I don't know that I've seen anything else he's done.

So I don't know if it was weird that I was getting M. Night Shayamalan vibes from Leave the World Behind.  It could be because it seems to share a similar same set-up to A Knock At The Cabin and then runs a story that could be The Happening, if those films had a rich soundtrack and a plethora of Friends references.

It's a potent production, but its power peters out the more it preaches rather than implies.