Not A Review Of “Godzilla Minus One”

So not long ago, the Academy Award-winning* kaiju film Godzilla Minus One made a surprise appearance on Netflix**. The astute reader will not be surprised to learn that we (meaning I) watched it as soon as possible.

As it happened, my wife wandered in while I was starting it, and based on information I heard, I tried to get her to sit down and watch it with me.

Me: “Do you want to watch Godzilla Minus One? I’ve heard it’s pretty character-driven for a monster movie.”
Wife (dubious): “Okay …”

So she sat down to watch it for a minute. Unfortunately this minute was the one where Godzilla, in his original, not-so-giant form, stages a nighttime assault on an island kamikaze base, stomping on people, squashing airplanes, and picking up soldiers in his teeth and flinging them off into the darkness.

Wife: “Character-driven? It looks like the character doing the driving is a giant dinosaur robot.”

The long-time reader will not be surprised to hear that my wife wandered off at this point, although she did wander back in some time later, when Our Heroes are out on a crummy wooden ship engaged in their new career, which used to be “Find And Blow Up Mines”, but is now “Distract Godzilla Until The Real Ships Can Get There”***.

Wife: “What are they doing?”
Me: “They’re out looking for Godzilla.”
Wife: “In that?”
Me: “Yes.”
Wife: “I think they need a bigger boat.”
Me: “They think so too.”

Anyway, she hung around for a little while, probably because the scene was giving her Jaws flashbacks, so she got to see the famous scene where Godzilla is in hot pursuit of the little boat while the littler people on the little boat try to figure out a way not to get turned into a small dinner or light snack. You can see part of this scene here:

Wife: “Look at him back there, swimming like an iguana.”

In this clip, Our Heroes have managed to get Godzilla to catch a mine in his mouth, and Our Main Hero is operating a machine gun to try to hit the mine and cause it to detonate. The clip ends with the explosion, and therefore doesn’t show the aftermath, which is that ― extremely minor spoiler alert! ― Godzilla now has a rather large hole in his head. To Our Heroes’ collective horror, however, said hole immediately begins to close backup.

Shirō Mizushima: “Did we get it?”
Kenji Noda: “No we did not!”

Displaying a healing factor even better than Wolverine’s, Godzilla almost immediately recovers from having his brains blown out and resumes his efforts to catch and/or destroy the little wooden ship. At this point my wife checked out again.

Wife: “I already know how this movie is going to go. It’ll be two hours of someboday saying ‘Did we get it?’ and somebody else saying ‘No we did not!’.”

I would characterize this description as “reductive but not inaccurate”, and reported back to her a couple of times on how things were going, e.g.:

Me: “Hey, they just shot Godzilla with a bunch of tanks. Do you think they got him?”
Wife: “No they did not!”

And:

Me: “They just hit Godzilla with missiles! Did they get him?”
Wife: “No they did not!”

You get the idea.

Because my wife never stuck around for long, I cannot give this film a rating for how fast it put her to sleep, but I’m pretty sure the answer would have been “almost immediately”. Or, to put it another way:

Q: Would Godzilla Minus One keep my wife awake for any length of time?
A: No it would not!

* The Best Visual Effects Academy Award might not be Best Picture or Best Director, but it is still an Academy Award.
** Not unlike how Godzilla himself often makes surprise appearances in Tokyo. Or wherever.
*** At this point, Godzilla has been ― spoiler alert!**** ― mutated by nuclear weapons testing from a building-sized monster into a skyscraper-sized monster. Now with atomic breath!
**** Not really.