"We'll need a miracle to make it work." "Doing nothing won't cause a miracle, either." - That's an exchange of lines in "Gojira -1.0", which somehow catches the essence of this monster movie, in some way like a metaphor, in the sense that I wouldn't have expected that some Godzilla iteration to be so different, positively speaking, from the rest. In any case, we shouldn't forget that what we have here is not the typical made in Hollywood. Even so, I don't remember hearing a lot about the drama depth of the Japanese series. Because, if we draw a line, what we got here is much more drama than monster movie.
The subject is set at the end of WW2, in a disintegrated Japan, where in the beginning of the movie a deserting kamikaze pilot lands on an island hosting a maintenance post for planes, which during that evening is wiped out by a creature risen from the ocean. But our guy survives, together with the chief mechanic, who accuses him of cowardness on confronting the monster, and blames him for the death of the others. What follows is the more consistent drama part, where guilt follows the pilot when returning back to Tokyo, where he tries to find a meaning to live in the ruins left after the war, together with a woman and an adopted child who lost their parents in some enemy raids as he did. When thing look like beginning to settle somehow, Gojira returns, bringing back the memories about what happened on the island. And from here, the movie starts to resemble more a Hollywood monster movie, but still what follows doesn't lose the much more complex drama tone built up to that moment.
"Gojira -1.0" does not have the standard VFX of a summer box-office, where if you take some scene with explosions and shrapnels, you have good changes to interchange it with a some other from a different movie. It's much more particular what we have here, because first of all it moves onwards from a visual experience that seems more real precisely due to lack of exaggeration in what you can see. We don't have all the possible colors splashed over the screen when something blows up. Besides that, I didn't watch the last Hollywood encounters between Godzilla and Kong, but here the monster looks more like extracted from the old Japanese stop-motions and brought into the modern VFX age. You finally get more "blueish" effects when Godzilla starts using its weapons, but even so what's on screen keeps a much more credible look than what you get in many other movies.
To conclude, the movie deserves watching for the story, out of which I didn't reveal much, and which has a decent density, for its visuals and audio, but mostly for the very good intertwinning between drama and action, and for its continuous metaphor that favors life, which comes in a strong contrast with an idea of exaggerated sacrifice oftenly met in the Japanese culture.
Rating: 4 out of 5
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