W.B. at the Movies: Godzilla Minus One

The last time I was in a real movie theater, it was Christmas 2019 and the film was Star Wars IX: The Rise of Skywalker. So I had a bit of culture shock when I walked in Wednesday evening: Every seat was a leather, power recliner, there was plenty of room for people to walk in front of me even with the legs extended, and each row was elevated above the other so high that everyone had an unobstructed view of the screen.

The occasion was a “Early Access Fan Event” screening of Godzilla Minus One, the new Japanese-language film from Toho, the movie company that started it all with Gojira back in 1954. It turns out that “Early Access Fan Event” was just a fancy way of saying you could see the film two nights before its official U.S. release on Friday. There were no special treats or features for Godzilla fans; it was just a regular showing of a new movie, just two days early.

Which is fine by me. I just wanted to see a Godzilla movie on the big screen with a state-of-the-art sound system, where a monster the size of a skyscraper looks as big as a skyscraper and its footsteps and roar shake the building. Mission accomplished.

And, oh my. I took to social media as the closing credits rolled. I wrote:

“Fellow geeks, the rumors are true. Godzilla Minus One is magnificent.”

The monster effects are as good as you’d expect in 2023, and on the Superscreen DLX with Dolby Atmos sound, it’s like you’re going to be squashed or at least hit by flying debris any second. But the human story takes it to another level.

It begins in 1945 in the closing days of World War II, and we meet Koichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who lands at an airstrip on Odo Island and tells mechanics his plane is malfunctioning. There’s nothing wrong with the plane and it quickly becomes clear he just didn’t want to go through with his mission.

Shikishima is deeply ashamed of himself, even when a mechanic tells him it would have been a meaningless sacrifice given that Japan was days away from losing the war. The film follows him as he tries to atone for surviving a war where his assignment was to kill himself and as many enemy soldiers as possible at the same time.

Of course, Godzilla fans guessed what happens at the airstrip as soon as I mentioned Odo Island. That’s where the big lizard was first sighted in 1954, and the island has made numerous appearances in the 37 Godzilla movies that span almost 70 years now.

People who come for the monster rather than the story might grow impatient with this one, but people like me who appreciate a good story with their monsters will go home happy. And even the people who want wall-to-wall monster action should be content with Godzilla’s moments on center stage.

A couple of moments would have made me stand up and cheer if I wasn’t so comfortable in the recliner. First, the final confrontation with Godzilla is undertaken by a stalwart group of civilians after a pointed remark that the job is too important to leave to the Japanese or U.S. governments. Can I get an amen?

My other “OMG this film is magnificent” is a musical cue. The theme that accompanies the opening credits of the original movie is called back in almost every film, and the makers of Godzilla Minus One dropped the theme at the absolute perfect moment near the climax.

The last 10 years have been wonderful for Godzilla fans. The 2014 U.S. version completely erased the sour taste left by the goofy 1998 Hollywood debacle, and the American sequels haven’t been too shabby, either.

But the last two Toho films have been, in my humble opinion, absolutely brilliant. Shin Godzilla in 2016 and now Godzilla Minus One have taken the story back to square one: Both treat Godzilla as a brand-new menace that had never been seen before. They fall more in the category of reboot than sequel. I love that approach, and I considered Shin Godzilla the second-best Godzilla movie ever until Wednesday night. Godzilla Minus One is simply breathtaking.

(The first Godzilla movie is in a league of its own, as I wrote not long ago.)

6 o’clock

“There’s something special about 6 o’clock in the morning.” What a great first line for a song. I’m not sure John Sebastian quite pulled it off — it’s not one of his most memorable songs — but many mornings at 6 o’clock, I sing the first line.

This time of year, 6 o’clock in the morning is dark and cold and quiet, and I think the dogs are nuts to want to go out there. But I remember 6 a.m.s when the sun is shining and birds are calling to each other and the air is bright with the promise of a new day.

I’m guessing Mr. Sebastian wrote that first line in the summer.

Still, warm or cold, 6 o’clock represents the beginning of the day for most people, a proverbial and literal fresh start, a time for reorganizing and refreshing and preparation and taking a deep, quiet breath before plunging into the chaos of another day.

There’s something special about that moment.

Something, anything

The value of establishing a writing streak is enormous. Making the commitment to write something, anything, every day, creates a habit that is hard to break, and especially once you have sailed past 1,000 days, then 1,100 days, and then 1,200 days. You just don’t want to go back and start counting from 1 all over again.

Still, inevitably you’ll have a day like this one, a day when you can’t think of anything to write about except the streak.

It’s weird. You might have just finished your first significant bit of fiction in almost a decade and published your first significant bit of fiction in nine years.

It may, in fact, be your first published book of any kind in more than a year.

You might have all sorts of ideas rolling through your head.

And yet still, some days, you find that none of your ideas are formed well enough to convert into a coherent blog post.

You kick yourself for not working far enough in advance, despite your best intentions to work ahead and especially never to leave the blog until the end of the night.

But you made a commitment, and so you sit down, reluctantly, to scratch out a little something about writing for the sake of extending a writing streak.

“This is the 1,215th day in a row that I have posted something here — three years, three months, 28 days,” you write. “And isn’t that something?”

And you realize, why, yes, it is something, isn’t it? After decades of writing intermittently and thinking how good it must be to develop a regular writing habit, you did it. You’ve been writing and posting something here every day for so long it’s second nature to write something, anything.

You know there will be days that you write something more interesting or thought-provoking or entertaining, because you’ve already had days like that. You know there will be days when you come up with three and four and a half-dozen blog posts, because you’ve had those, too.

In short, if you follow through on a commitment long enough, the days when the words barely trickle out don’t trouble you all that much, because you’ve also had days when the floodgates open.

And so you write a few words about not having much to write about today, and you sleep well, looking forward to what you will write next.