Godzilla: Minus One - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

1945: Japan is on the verge of surrendering. A kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) takes his plane in to be serviced on a remote island yet untouched by American island-hopping forces. That evening, they are attacked by a massive, dinosaur-like creature we know as Godzilla. Shikishima is ordered to slip into his plane and open fire on it with its large-caliber machine guns, but he freezes. He freezes and is paralyzed with fear and only he and one other person survive. The other survivor calls him a coward. When he returns home, his neighbors call him a coward, too, for being a kamikaze pilot to survive the war. His job, his mission, was to die. And he couldn’t even do that right.

Shikishima makes the acquaintance of Noriko Oishi, a woman who has survived the American bombing campaign but has seen her family and her previous life taken from her. Together, Shikishima and Noriko take care of Akiko, an infant whose parents died in the bombings. Shikishima is racked with guilt for surviving. He believes it was his destiny to die, and is afraid, nearly every waking day, that he died on that island when Godzilla attacked, and that everything else he’s experiencing is the dream (or hallucination) of a dead man. Noriko believes that they survived the war for a reason. And that’s, at its core, what Godzilla Minus One is about: It’s about the importance of life and cherish it. Life has such amazing value, and it’s constantly being sacrificed in the name of war. In a post-war Japan, it was important for them to remember how much meaning their lives had, just by virtue of being alive. 

Every good Godzilla movie knows that a Godzilla movie is only as good as its human characters. If the drama in between citywide destruction is no good, the movie falls on its face. Without that emotional investment, there’s simply no reason to care. Carnage and mayhem by themselves are a boring thing. Godzilla Minus One understands this on a fundamental level and, more so than so many other movies of its type, wants to make sure that we care what happens. 

Take, for instance, a classic Godzilla gag: A train is running and Godzilla stops by and grabs the thing for a snack. He chomps on it and, from inside the train, we see his eye pressed up against the window. People scream. They fall. They die. In Godzilla Minus One, we see the classic train gag, but the difference now is that someone we know is onboard. Not just that, she’s not just a main character or a plot device, she’s someone we’ve really gotten to know, intimately. And we don’t want to see her die. The train is now dangling over the city and falling from it means certain death.

Oh, my god, I felt myself wondering. How is she going to get out of this?

This is what every filmmaker of every monster movie wants their audience to feel, but so few can actually achieve this level of investment, to squirm with anxiety in anticipation of what may happen next. It takes a lot of work to build the story and the characters up for this type of audience investment, but it’s even harder act to pull off to convince an audience that a main character may indeed perish in a run-of-the-mill action sequence that’s been with a 70-year-old franchise from the very beginning.

Now that’s good filmmaking.

The “Minus One” of the title is two-fold, referring to it, in some ways, being a prequel or reboot to the original film–negative one, going before the “zero” of the original. It also refers to the state of nothingness that Japan existed in after the war, ravaged by destruction, only to have another war on their hands, taking the country into a negative space.

Godzilla Minus One is on the more serious spectrum of the franchise, along with the original Godzilla and Shin Godzilla. It's not only one of the best of the series, it's one of the best monster movies ever made. Period. It’s massive in scale, intimate in story and there’s never a dull moment to be found. It’s thrilling, exhilarating and terrifying. It is also somber and sad in its quieter moments. It’s not just one of the best Godzilla movies, it’s one of the best movies of the year.

I want the makers of the Apple series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to study Godzilla Minus One to see how to deftly balance human drama and a full-scale creature feature. Monarch stumbles again and again on its way to the finish line, with dreadful writing and unlikable characters. Worse yet, it’s dull–criminally dull, focused on building a cinematic universe with no clear vision at its center. It merely exists and tries to establish a mythos on the fly. It sometimes baffles me how bad American studios are at making Godzilla, but perhaps at the end of the day, it’s because it’s not America’s story to tell. Godzilla is such a uniquely Japanese metaphor, about seeing their country destroyed by mammoth, damn near Biblical forces. American versions of the story focus on the spectacle and the grandeur but lack emphasis on the horror of seeing the impossible come to life.

Godzilla and I go way back. It’s nice to see him given a story that knows how to handle him. His presence is treated with the appropriate amount of gravity and the parable presented, in a world today still ravaged by war and destruction, struggling to find meaning in the importance of human life, is just as relevant as ever. Godzilla Minus One is breathtaking in every way. It's going to rememered for a long, long time.

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Godzilla Minus One shrieks, stomps and roars on 4K UHD in a two-disc release that contains the feature film on a BD-100 disc and all special features on a Blu-ray disc labeled "bonus." The movie plays straight to the feature without first loading the menu screen. 

Godzilla Minus One was shot digitally and was graded in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible) for this release. The results are incredible at every single turn, in every aspect of this film's visual presentation, it amazes. In its quieter moments, the drab gray of a crumbling Japan feels like a vintage newsreel. Sequences featuring the Big Guy himself, Godzilla, gleam brilliant, blue light from his scales and orange hellfire fury from his breath.

Intimate moments between characters are filmed with a warm color palette that harkens back to the classic films that inspired it, bathed in golden sunlight and skin tones just the right amount of red and tan. Throughout, details are incredibly sharp and the wide color spectrum feels natural. Grading on the shadows, in particular, helps what we're witnessing feels like an exaggerated reality. The film's cinematographer Kôzô Shibasaki used Zeiss prime lenses, which help attribute to a very organic filmic look, replete with grain (although this may have been achieved in post). All told, the results are impeccable. Godzilla Minus One on 4K is among the finest-looking home media available.

Like its visual presentation, Godzilla Minus One's audio performance on 4K UHD Blu-ray is in a class of its own, boasting one of the best Dolby Atmos mixes I've ever heard on a home media release. Two mixes are available: An English-dubbed 5.1 lossless Dolby TrueHD mix and the Japanese-language Dolby Atmos mix.

If you aren't subtitle-averse, there's absolutely no reason not to be listening to the Atmos mix. Rear-and-top activity is at a nearly constant level. When Godzilla smashes through a city, we can hear him roar all around us, the soundstage enveloping the listener in a bubble. Falling debris, rain, airplanes firing machine guns, even the classic monster musical score from Naoki Sato soar through the top speakers.

This is a LOUD movie, as it should be. My subwoofer was pounding with every footstep the creature took and sound effects smash and crash with the right amount of oomph. But this is also a well-balanced movie. Even during the most destructive moments, you won't be covering your ears or reaching for the controller to turn it down, or turn it back up when characters are talking. Dialogue level is always favored above the mayhem, because this is a movie that tells a story, first and foremost. It uses its effects in service of the story above all else.

In the opening moments of the film, when Godzilla first appears, he lets out a roar that triggers every speaker in my setup--the fronts, the sides, the tops, and the subwoofer. 11.1.4 channels working together to bring this effect to life, to fill my home theater with this terrifying sound, and it was an exhilarating moment. It was so perfectly executed, my eyes welled with tears. I blinked them away, and that level of excellence carried throughout the entirety of the feature, all the way until the incredible finale that recreates Akira Ifukube's classic Gojira theme.

The bonus disc loaded with tons of information about the production history on Godzilla Minus One. There are a number of featurettes, Q&As from various film festivals and premieres, and talk show appearance interviews. Most of the features are in Japanese, but English subtitles automatically display.

• Behind the Scenes (HD 1:05:27)
• VFX Behind the Scenes (HD 19:26)
• Theater Release Commemorative Specail Feature: "Behind the Scenes: Godzilla Minus One -No.30-" (HD 22:26)
• Event Video Collection (HD 1:10:00)
• Takashi Yamazaki Talk Shows (HD 1:05:00)
• Academy Awards Winner Additional Screening Trailer (HD 0:35)

When Godzilla Minus One was released a year ago, it was one of my favorite movie theater experiences. Ever. Because it had a palpable love of its story that the filmmakers wanted to convey to their audience. It said something and said it beautifully, eloquently, and entertainingly in a monster movie that had equal parts brain and brawn. It felt like the first time I'd seen Jaws, where memorable characters carry a thrilling story through one memorable scene followed by another. Fast forward to one year later and it's now one of my favorite home theater experiences, with incredible visuals, beautiful HDR grading, and a Dolby Atmos score that soars over the top, literally and figuratively. Godzilla Minus One is a Must Own.