As Godzilla Minus One—the latest addition to the Godzilla-verse, and the thirty-seventh film in the franchise—hurtles towards its climax, the youthful Shirō (Yuki Yamada) begs his older crewmates to let him join the fight against the monstrous Godzilla. Having been too young to serve in the Japanese army during World War ii, Shirō has spent the whole film asserting his valour and disappointment in having missed his chance to fight Japan’s enemies. “No,” his older crewmates tell him. “You should be proud of not having served in war.” This is the ethos of Godzilla Minus One, the first truly anti-war Godzilla movie. Godzilla has always had an uneasy relationship to militarism and war. On the one hand, the saurian monster is conventionally read as directly inspired by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a monstrous allegory for military technoscience run amok. On the other, his human opponents are often themselves soldiers or veterans of war, and in more than one film Godzilla is ultimately defeated by their heroic sacrifices. Godzilla Minus One addresses this legacy explicitly, setting the film immediately after WWII and moving Godzilla’s ambivalent relationship to war from thematic subtext to explicit text. Its protagonist, Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), is a former kamikaze pilot haunted both by his choice as the war ended to flee rather than sacrifice himself and by an immediately subsequent encounter with Godzilla. The film is fundamentally about these traumas, blending together the figure of Godzilla as a monstrous reminder of the violence of war and Shikishima’s ongoing struggle over whether he has the right to continue living in the immediate postwar years. The ways in which the film answers this question are moving and thoughtful, as is its broader rejection of Japanese militarism and its ideology of sacrificial violence. Godzilla Minus One feels radically contemporary in this rejection, and exceptionally timely.

—Joseph Weiss