I'm Alex Scho. I'm Sharon Scho. And welcome to... School of Movies. Cozira, minus one. His nation is in ruins. [speaking in foreign language] His people traumatized. [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] Now, an orphaned veteran of losing war must rebuild his shattered life into... [speaking in foreign language] He's got to fight Godzilla, too? A man cannot get you break. Godzilla, minus one. While the American Godzilla films ask questions like, "What if his monkey friend got a power glove?" [music] Japan is taking things a little more seriously. [speaking in foreign language] In a period piece about the value of life itself, the healing power of shared purpose and the importance of aiming for the mouth where Godzilla takes extra damage. [speaking in foreign language] [speaking in foreign language] He's a living kamikaze pilot, facing questions answered by the fact that he's a living kamikaze pilot. After the war, he'll rely on his extensive, not dying experience. [speaking in foreign language] Taking up gigs in mind removal. [explosion] Godzilla distractor. [speaking in foreign language] And right on back to kamikaze pilot. Swoon as he falls for Noriko. A thief who I'm 90% sure stole that baby. [speaking in foreign language] Together, they'll form a makeshift family with the noziest neighbor in post-war Japan and forge a bond that nothing could break. Not even getting absolutely blown the [beep] away by Godzilla. [screaming] Finally, see Oppenheimer from the Japanese perspective that's also skeptical of its own government in wartime. But explores those themes through a thick [beep] nuclear dinosaur. Along for the ride is an extremely lovable crew of dudes. The boat captain who's done with the whole loose lip sync ships thing. The mechanic our hero tracks down through the power of trolling and baby Yoda. I mean Dr. Noda, the only surviving scientist and/or engineer in Japan. Together, they'll launch a novel plan to kill Godzilla, sink him to the bottom of the ocean, and let pressure do the job. So strap in for a masterfully executed monster movie that does the impossible by making you care about the humans too. Because they spent time and skill developing these characters instead of blowing 100 million on VFX and calling it a day. Wait, I'm sorry, it cost how much? 15 million? So this is what 15 million looks like. And this is 100, 15, 100, 15, 100? Make it make sense. Oh, that was three big-budget American Hollywood blockbusters that were considerably pricier than 100 million dollars each. You've got the flash costing 220 million dollars. Thor love and thunder costing 250 million dollars. An Ant-Man in the wasp in quantum mania costing 326 million dollars. What are you spending that on? This would be because the studios are still on the... You have to spend money to make money. Model, which is becoming increasingly outdated. Man-eater by the sea. Oh, one last thing, just to go back to Trapper. It's really, really pleasant to see a man playing an emotionally sensitive guy who's also a hero and is cocky and funny and isn't the butt of the jokes. It's Bernie who's freaking out all the time and he's chasing fame, he's chasing acknowledgement. He wants to be told he was right all along. But Trapper's so content with what he does and so happy to be there, playing support that while he would be a joke character in a Michael Bay film to cruelly laugh at this stupid fucking hippie, in this he's a guy who switched on and knows what to do in each given situation. Oh, that's why I thought with Matthew McConaughey work, he reminds me of Farmer Joss in Contact. Yeah, he's also chilled. Yeah, it's that sort of underlying, I am secure enough that I don't have anything to prove to anybody. Yeah, you know, they were trying to do a godful over the King Kong since like the 80s and 90s, so it would be, if that had happened then Matthew McConaughey would be playing this character, if this character existed, exactly as you said. Oh, actually now thinking about it, he and Matthew McConaughey has played a very different type character in a film with Kaiju. He was a Captain Ahab style, I gotta kill all them dragons. Tug guy, do you remember that? Oh yeah, in Reign of Fire. Oh man, with Christian Bale, before he was famous, and Jima Butler, also before he was same thing. So yeah, so we got a ticket to the dragons. Yeah, that movie could have been great if it just wasn't so shit. So, I thought about movie... Oh, there was so many films that you could say that about. I thought that movie in theatre is randomly on a Sunday, I just went to theatre and just went once playing in the next 20 minutes. Oh, that's playing in '15. Sure, I heard about it, and those dragons, why not? It's all right, like you didn't offend any of my sensibilities, but I feel like it under achieves like crazy. It's definitely stupid. The thing I remember about it the most actually that was the most kind of appealing, and actually this is pretty good world building, is that at the beginning, Butler and Bale are acting out the climactic scene in 'The Empire Strikes Back'. One of them's being Bader, the other one's being Luke, for a bunch of kids who have only ever known a dragons rule in the world for the past 15 years, so they've never seen Empire. And they are like, "Whoa, he's as great as his father!" And so yeah, I was like, that actually would happen in the rubble. Right. So, again, appropriately for what we're about to cover. Godzilla minus one is a different beast, following on from the celebrated modern day Shin Godzilla from 2016, which contains themes critical of the Japanese government in the modern age, and how they have handled some of the disasters of the past. This one turns a critical eye on the World War II rulership, and the troubling nature of Kamikaze pilots put into their fighter planes with the intended end of their flight being a suicide run, expanding a human life and a plane to smite at their enemy, as well as illustrating how dedicated their military were. They will follow us unto death, that is how dedicated they are. Kill yourself to prove your love for me. This practice has its roots in the samurai, honor bound to commit seppuku should they fail to honor their feudal lords. It is in fact a rare thing to watch a Japanese-made movie that acknowledges this tradition as needing revision for a new age, where human life should by all rights supersede the version of honor where it is better to die than live in shame. At the beginning, Japanese soldiers in the 1940s hold up on a Pacific island encounter Godzilla, and this is a bad nasty mean Godzilla. The lone survivor of that encounter, Koichi Shikishima, stays alive because he deliberately declined to attack Godzilla in a way that might not kill the Kaiju but would definitely kill him. It is not a coincidence that the opening is on a Pacific island. The primary sightings of the beast in the 1954 original Gojira took place on one of those as well, but it was- It's a game island, actually. Odo Island, same one. Same one. Well, look, took place on Odo Island as well, but it wasn't arbitrary then either due to the now-known phenomena in the mid-1950s of Japanese soldiers on these very islands still emplaced and under the impression World War II was still going. Minus 1 takes that tragic mental condition of being forever in conflict as a survivor, and it makes it the core focus of the movie. I'm going to shush because my voice hurts and I mainly- Oh, Sharon has a lot to say about this one. I think it's magnificent, but the things I have to say are very precise, if that makes sense. So I'm going to let Dan also fill us in because you know a lot more about Japanese culture than we do as well. So before we get to that, I suppose this is more of a fun one, which influences do you suspect or do you know to be true to be in here? Because I saw a couple. Well, the director, Takashi Yamazaki, his four favorite movies- Godzilla movies specifically are the original '54. Gidora from 1964, GMK, Godzilla Mothric Gidora, Giant Moss is a lot of attack from 2001. That's a really good one, and that kind of- Stematically is a nice kind of in the middle. It bookends between like this, Shin, and that. They all kind of talk to some degree about like government and Japanese history, and the, you know, the shadier parts of their history, and Shin Godzilla is his fourth favorite one as well. So those are ones that definitely have a lot of influence for him. Obviously, Gidora 64 has lessened this because that one just has more personal connection for him because he was born in Matsumoto City in the Nagano Prefecture, and in that movie, when Gidora first appears, he's flying through castles, so it just stuck with him. It's like, that's my town. I know that- I know that place and so forth, so- but he's he's much more fan of the scarier and more menacing godfuls than the more what the monster versus is necessarily doing, and that part of his history that they've kind of embraced and adopted. This guy just happens to be my favorite Japanese director working today. He directed Lupin 3 the first, the Dora-man films, I suppose I can narrow it down, stand by me Dora-man and stand by me Dora-man two, both of which are really good, and Dragon Quest, your story. He's fantastic, he has a background in both live-action and anime, and both of those come into play here, and clearly, is this his first actual Kaiju movie? Yes, well, I'm gonna get a fan of the two who are going, now there's a giant monster in this thing, or like the giant Dora-man counts as a Kaiju. Well, for example, like the movies that really kind of made them break out is a trilogy of movies that they did called Always Sunset on Third Street, which are really good, by the way, if you can track them down. The first one's hard to track down, the second one's actually relatively easy to track down, but it's a family just sort of recovering. He's done a lot of period pieces because this also is like 1950s, and it's just kind of like a family life getting on their feed post-war kind of, you know, social commentary thing, but in the very beginning of that second movie, there is a dream sequence, and it is the start of the movie that is Godzilla attacking Tokyo in 1954, and so he actually did the first ever fully CGI Toho Godzilla ever. Wow, it's only in it for like 10 seconds or something like that, and it's a lot of like the dream sequences, like the chaos of what's going on, like you see in Tomogbreath blast the Tokyo Tower in the background or something, and then you see Godzilla at the very end, and the theme's playing and whatnot, and then the dad, because he's the one having the dream like his hair starts going super second. Okay, I have plenty of time for this guy. I've noted down Always Sunset on Third Street from 2005 and the sequel in 2007 to watch. There's a third one that's a few years later after that too. Oh yeah, I noted 2012. Yeah, and then he did the 2010 live action adaptation of Space Battleship Yamato. He's done other manga and anime things as well. There was a movie recently, I was called something like Battle of Our Comedies or something like that. Great War of Our Comedies, that's another period piece that's about the actual battleship Yamato and the Okinawan conflict where it got sunk and everything. You give me so much extra homework in a good way. That's, I've noted those ones down. Thank you. So, other influences that you may have seen? I'm not really necessarily sure on other outside influences. I mean, there's bits and bobs here and there. I mean, obviously like he's a big Spielberg fan, so obviously the, you know, sequence in the boat chase very Jaws. Yes, I put that down. Which he absolutely admits to, and with the lead up to the Oscars and everything, he met Spielberg. No, no, it's because he was doing the felt Freedman's. Yeah, he was doing all the press junk and for the Academy Awards and everything. And so he met him there like a luncheon and had a very nice conversation where Spielberg was like, I love minus one. I saw it three times in theaters. Nice. Yeah, and one of the guys who did the effects work for the water sequences in particular was there with Yamazaki. And he was like, hey, this guy did the water stuff. That was like the Jaws homage. And that was like, you are talented. You have a bright future, and Yamazaki jokes. That will be the, that's, that's the peak of this man's career getting that praise. The Fablemans was what I was grasping for there. Director Takashi Yamazaki would probably have done the dial of destiny better, even though it was a Western film. Maybe because he would have made the CG bits look more real. They did an incredible job with a low budget for this Godzilla. Let me just double check what the, what this cost under 15 million. Good Lord. And they compare it to what's a recent movie that's rubbish. Compared to compared to the things that it was up against for the Oscar, got into the galaxy three was one that was up against for the visual effects Oscar and minus one one. So nice. Okay, Indiana Jones and the dial of destiny, that cost three hundred million dollars. Takashi could have bought it in cheaper and better. That really should make the point to them that you do not have to spend far out the ass to get good CG. And this is very Spielberg in terms of like, like, you know, focus on the family, this little broken family and the panic of losing it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the one of the things that, because you talk about influences and while this is sort of very much, well, obviously this is influencing him because he's drawing on the original Godzilla movies, but there's, there's something about the design of this Godzilla. It is very similar to the King of the Monsters Godzilla in terms of shape and in terms of his face. That King of the Monsters means several things. If you're a Godzilla fan, it means the original version. Sorry. The Neo Geo. The monster verse series. But because of how Godzilla is shot in this and because of how, in fact, they refer to it as it, not him, because of how it's framed. It's very aggressive and threatening. And you only ever see the tiny little eyes far away, unless you've got a shot of the head down on the water. It was so fucking scary in the water, those eyes that it looked very alive in a way that, like, monster verse version still looks alive, but with these tiny eyes inside a giant, curved forehead that kind of make it seem like there is intelligence in there, but he's absolutely massive. This is a smaller Lena Godzilla who will pay attention to you. Yes, I've got one or two. He's got this texture on him that is very rocky and sort of makes him, sorry, I keep going him in. It should be it for this one, which makes it feel very much of the earth. But at the same time, it's this very, you don't want it anywhere near you. There is no sense of maybe this time he'll be on our side going on with this one. I got some Christopher Nolan from this as well. The Don Kirk aspect of the parallel stories happening at once and specifically the fact that at the end, it's the Japanese citizens doing this for themselves because they can't rely on the military. Oh, and also one more, the 47 Ronin. This is not a film that people like or ever talk about, but it happens to feature the star of Shogun. So folks might want to go back and check this one. At the time, he was not really a big known actor. Hiryoki Sinada and working in conjunction with Keanu Reeves as kind of a western man who's been integrated into this samurai group. And there's Kaiju and monsters in there. I am actually going to re-edit the film into black and white without monsters so that it feels like a Kurosawa film. The only thing holding me back at the moment is that I went all the way out of my way to get the Japanese version. And the English subtitles are weirdly stacked like a wedding cake. So they cannot allow them to spread out. They've got to be in the middle, actually breaking up the beautiful cinematography. And like, that is the weirdest fucking choice. And I'm still trying to work out whether I will go to the trouble of actually subtitling the whole thing myself. Anyway, at the end, with them in the name of honor for their master, commit seppuku. And the whole thing feels like it's very, very honorable, but it's a terrible waste of life. And I feel like that, being part of Japanese mythology, and that you can read a critique into there of this is a waste of human life, is also somewhere in the mix here. There is a choice made in that, which I would say is a nod to one of the very deliberate choices made in this movie as well. One of the Ronin, his son, is also part of the group. His son is allowed to step aside and not commit seppuku. Yeah. That's his reward is his line does not get ended. Though he was prepared to, he was standing up there with his comrades. Yeah, but that sort of feeds into one of the really strong themes in this, which is this not wanting the shadow of war to hang over the next generation. Yeah, because they leave the kid behind when he'll be here in 1100 hours or whatever, and they leave him behind. He comes back with the tugboat brigade to help save the day at the end, obviously, and everything. But yeah, he's screaming at them, like, "Come on, I want to come with you." And they're like, "No, we're leaving the future to you." That's why we're not letting you go. And even right before that, the scientist, Kenji Noda, he's talking about our country has for far too long treated lives cheaply. Subpart of these airplanes, the no ejector seeds, kamikaze pilots, and, you know, they don't say, but you can written down, it's my favorite words in the entire film. It's come to think of it, this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks, poor supply chains, resulting in half of all deaths from starvation disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seeds. And finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That's why this time I'd take pride in a citizen-led effort that sacrifices no lives at all. This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future. Yeah, which really ties into all this, right? It's fighting to live and that struggle to carry on and continue on rather than, yes, doing the "honorable thing." You know, he doesn't say samurai committing sappuku in there, but you could just throw that in there and be like, yeah, that also falls on that list. To valid interpretation. Yeah, and it comes from this creating a sense of, like you said, using honor and pride and shame as sticks to beat people with to make them do what you want them to do. And even Willow picked up on the fact that the veterans who step forward and say, yes, we'll do this when they're working out who's going to man the ships. Part of their motivation is we don't want to create another generation of veterans. If we don't do this, then people who haven't done this before and have no experience will have to step up and do it. And then they're going to be haunted by the same shadows that we are. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, there's so much depth to this story and the various ways in which this plays out for different characters, different groups of people, right? It's just really well done. You know, I mean, obviously Shikoshima himself, the main character, obviously the focal point of it, but you know, Godzilla, for him in particular, is just this haunting PTSD survivor's guilt that keeps coming back for him. Yeah, and he has this power of three thing going on with his flight instinct taking over from his fight instinct, and occasionally colliding and creating a freeze instinct, where he sort of at the very beginning of the movie, he has he's supposed to be part of a Kamikaze squadron. And when the rest of his group have gone off to complete their mission, he's landed on Odo Island saying that his plane has technical difficulties, but the engineer who's looking over it can't find anything wrong with it. So he twigs that he's, you know, Koichi has made it up because he was too scared to go into battle. That puts him in the position of being there with his plane, with the only gun on the island that stands half a chance of taking Godzilla out, or at least distracting him enough to get him away long enough for everybody else to escape. But again, Koichi fails to act. He manages to get behind the handle of the gun, but then he freezes up. He is afraid to fire on Godzilla because he doesn't want to draw that wrath towards himself. It's literally not pulling the trigger. Exactly, yeah. So and then the next morning, he finds out that everybody else apart from his engineer has been killed. And it's this sense of he keeps running away from this fate that was given to him that he didn't choose. He was appointed to be a Kamikaze pilot. It obviously wasn't something that he wanted to do. And he just, it is not in him to make that kind of a sacrifice. It's not not, it's not obviously that he didn't want to do it because within that culture, there were plenty of young men lined up very willing to give their lives. They shouldn't have been. Yeah. And I mean, when I say, you know, it's a destiny that's better pointed to him, that sort of it's, I mean, more what Noda is saying later on about this is the government told everybody to do this. Whereas the the crew that he's putting together at the end, there is very much a sense of you step forward if you want to, we aren't going to force you to do this. This is about defending your homes, defending your families, but it is by choice. It is not drafted is not conscription. We aren't going to do that. And if you couple with that, the fact that like, you know, people often forget that Japan was already ensconced in a war for like a decade before World War one even broke out with their invasion of China, that had been going on since I think 1931. It's like a decade before Pearl Harbor happened and drawn the US into it. But like, that was, and you know, it was conquest. That was territorial. That was an imperialistic, expansionist reason for doing it to try to build an empire out of. And so, you know, they, it's more it falls to more of like, they were, you know, they were doing this and invading other countries to do so. And then Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, which does actually deal with a young kamikaze pilot who fails to complete. Yeah. And so it's this thing of they're not, you know, by the time they're doing kamikaze is at the end of World War two or the back part of it or whatever, throughout the Pacific, they're not it's not doing it to defend your homeland. It's not doing it for protecting your families. It's doing it to try to, to try to conquer, or at least knock the other person out of the fight so that they can go back to trying to conquer China and everything. And so, it's not like that's an aggressive stance in the first place and that they're being told to sacrifice themselves for something that they don't even necessarily believe in. Whereas at the end here, yeah, they're all stepping up to be willing to lay down their lives if need be to protect the future rather than to take someone else's future away from them. And there is also this recurring theme throughout of government that are useless. And it's the Japanese government is obviously the the clear front runner for because of where they're standing. And there is this sense of frustration that every time Godzilla hits, the government won't talk about it. They won't put how is not the time to start discussing Godzilla. Everyone's too emotional. They won't. Well, they won't even acknowledge that it's happened because they don't want everybody panicking. And this is Don't call me the mayor in jaws. I get really upset when you do that. We never see it happening, but there is an echo here of something that popped up in the earlier Godzilla movies, which was the people in positions of authority very specifically deciding to withhold information and not to let the public make their own choices and have their own responses based on that information. Then it was being called on it was being framed as this this is not a smart way to operate because you you end up leaving people unable to defend themselves because you haven't given them the information and the tools that they need to do that. And that is not like if you're going to be a functional, helpful government, that's like that's fundamental to what you need to be doing. Core to serving the people is to keep people informed as to what they need to know. Absolutely. But there's also a huge dig at the US government in this one as well, because it's again, I the subtitles that we had on ours were a little bit patchy and I'm not 100% sure whether this is outright stated. It took forever to come on Blu-ray, folks, you're it still hasn't. There you go. Not here, not here or anywhere outside of Japan. You can get in Japan's one without subtitles. Although frankly, I think I probably know it well enough by now that it wouldn't necessarily matter. But the it's great. You've seen it twice and loved it. Absolutely. The suggestion is that the nuclear testing at the Bikini Atoll is what revived Godzilla and what has brought him back. Like originally he was triggered by the nuclear bomb Hiroshima and now the Bikini Atoll testing has has revived him. And the American government's response to this is, "I'm leaving!" It's like they literally say, "We can't deal with this right now." So we're not going to. Japan, we expect you to handle this. That's not an MP, that is a YP. Have some decommissioned ships that we we didn't really want anyway. That's a lot and you sort it out. Oh, that's too perfect. Howard Stark worked on The Manhattan Project, famously in multiple versions of Iron Man. This is one of the many reasons to legitimately hate Howard Stark. That is not an MP, that is a YP, is a phrase used by the music executive in the movie Boogie Nights to Mark Wohlberg. That music executive is Robert Downey, Sr. To clarify some of that, so her own Shimon Nagasaki bombings don't have any effect on Godzilla whatsoever. It's, he's just existed in the state that we see him on Odo Island at the beginning for a long, long time. And, you know, people have asked, would the 20 millimeter gun on the plane have worked? No, he actually already had his regenerative powers. And that's why he survives Operation Crossroads, which is a nuclear test that we see in the movie. And that, in order to survive it, his regenerative property is going to overdrive, which is why he like triples in size and now has the atomic breath and everything, which he didn't at the start of the movie. And it wasn't really until we made him one. Well, and, and Gamazaki has said that, like, he very much understands that we did that to him. And so now he's specifically going, all right, kill humans now, you know, at the start of the movie, it was, you're on my territory and there's a ruckus and then you shot at me. So, you know, first he's trying to light my eyes. I don't like that. Yeah, no, he's very much by the time that like, he's housed the nuclear testing for Operation Crossroads. It is malicious. It is targeted specifically, you know, he's making a line towards Tokyo, but literally zigzagging to every ship that's in between him and there and destroying it out of spite because like, no, what? Fuck all of you. And so like, he is just very much this, you know, vindictive force in this that is actively targeting people. But yeah, and then the US government's response is something to keep in mind is that, you know, the original takes place in 1954. And this had taken place through 1945 to 1947. Like, US occupation goes on in Japan until 1952. So part of the ineffectiveness of the Japanese government is there's not really much of a Japanese government yet by 1947. And it is very much we're still occupying and calling the shots on like what you're doing. And yeah, in the movie, the excuse is MacArthur is the one saying to like, you know, they say like in a new thing, MacArthur said, yeah, we can't really deal with any of this because the Soviets. Yeah, that's the ticket, the Soviets. So take care of yourselves. Bye. And yet, if they try to perform countermeasures on Godzilla, the worry is the Americans will take that as another declaration of war. Yeah. There's also that's kind of mirrored by the job that Koishi finds himself ending up doing when he gets back to when he gets back home, the Lamma, which is the sea mines. Yeah, you've got these this small crew of veterans and one kid who's never seen war, but desperately wanted to on a wooden tugboat because wooden boats won't attract against the magnetic mines because yeah, anything made of metal would would pull them all out of the sea. But this is all true, by the way, like even the name, I forget the name of that. I forget the name of the boat that they're on, but that was an actual boat. It's not it's a bit bigger than that. The actual one was, but it was a real boat for this purpose. It sounds like something in World War Z, the kind of thing that would the that Max Brooks would actually have researched this cultural thing and turned that into something that gets used to deal with a fantastical threat. Yeah, it's also there like this little microcosm of what ends up having to happen with Godzilla because again, the government are like, we can't really give you any better equipment or or even guidance in terms of what you need to do because we don't want to attract attention. Yeah, and that the fact that they're just they're supposed to just distract or delay got so long enough for the one of the few Japanese naval ships that is still armed, the Ta-Kao, which was a heavy cruiser to get back into Japanese waters from Singapore, which is all actually historically accurate. Mostly the Ta-Kao was a ship that was surrendered to the British in Singapore at the end of World War II. Now it was scuttled in 1946 and then when it shows up in the movie, it's 1947. So this could be presupposes if maybe it wasn't. Well, we already know this. Yeah, Yamazaki himself said that Yamazaki himself said he's like, add one year difference to know who cares. But also the the fact that that Noda, the naval engineer who's on the crew with them, brings to bear some of his experience with this mind-cutting operation into the plan of how they're going to deal with Godzilla because they have these two ships with a line between them, a cable between them. And in terms of trying to get rid of these mines that have been left behind by the US and allied navies, they sort of pull this cable through the water. And when it catches on the mines that have been anchored to the bottom of the sea, they snip through the what it is that's holding them down. They bob up to the top and then it's like, what do we do with it now? We shoot at it until it blows up. That seems remarkably imprecise. Well, that's what we have. And the fact that Koishi is he's paralleled with the wooden boat in my eye because the point is the boat seems like junk, like it's broken past its use, but for the job it's being asked to do, it is fundamentally perfect because it's not made of metal and therefore it won't attract the magnetic mines. Koishi feels like he is useless for his sole intended purpose, but he is repurposed here and his skills with a fighter jet gun can be applied to the gun that they are able to then use to detonate the mines, which the other guys can't hit without wasting a shed load of ammunition, because they don't know that you have to accommodate for the movement, whereas because he's been using them in flight, he knows that. It's also important to note for the folks who haven't seen this, which is, I think, going to be the majority of you, that he does kind of carve himself out a new life when he gets back to Japan. It's very much lived in the rubble. He ends up kind of throwing his lot in with a lady called Nureka and the baby that she has a quiet question mark, but that they all resolve to take care of. There's a nosy neighbor who keeps kind of like sticking her orin, and there's a very almost chaste relationship that goes on between the two adults, like they've not got enough comfort and stability in this shanty town they're living in for multiple years to actually address where we are, where we were able to go. At this point, it's just subsist. But the way everything formulates around Akiko, the baby, is it's like she is the seed of the future. She is that future that they are going to end up fighting for, and she starts off as this abandoned child in the rubble, and Nureka has already found her and been looking after her and just happens to have left her alone for a moment, at which point Koichi comes out and is like, "Who has left this child? I don't know what to do with a child." Well, she shoves the child in. She's running away from someone. I have to leave the country. Take this baby. Exactly. So she's already taken on responsibility for this orphaned baby. Then Koichi takes on responsibility for the two of them. Then the neighbor initially is really cynical and dismissive about his reasons for doing this. Yeah, this woman is straight out of graver the fight for us. She really is to begin with, yeah. I mean, she's mourning to be fair for three children, and this is dead. She's like, "Do you think about her rice?" "Is the fact that she took my rice?" It's the fact that she transfers her grief and her blame for the fact that her children are dead onto the fact that he is alive. This is like the classic amplifying of survivor's guilt by somebody outside yourself saying, "Yeah, maybe you should be dead, and maybe then if you'd done your job, my children wouldn't be." Because it's really, really hard to argue with that. But then she gets to it as well. She's still a mother at the end of the day, is the thing. Her paternal instinct still takes over eventually. Absolutely, and so when she sees that they are having difficulty feeding the baby, she brings what she has to contribute, which is the rice, which they can then use to make rice milk for the child. And later on, Noriko brings her in as like a full-on child care. She ends up effectively being an auntie or grandma to Akiko. So kind of part of their broken little family. And it keeps this little family unit that's been pasted together out of what was left in the rubble. It keeps adding new people. All of Koichi's crew end up becoming extra uncles and grandfathers. And eventually, it's like, like I said, this theme of what we're doing for the future, it expands out to the whole of the community and it just keeps building. And Akiko is like this little central core, this seed that all of this is grown from. And to even further visualize on that, as there's things are getting a bit more stable, we have that nice montage with the nice relaxing music to it, of like, oh, things can actually kind of be okay here. As their family is growing and incorporating and settling into each other, they're the only people on the block that actually have rebuilt any sort of an actual home initially. And so like that further visualize this, because it all tries, ties into this rebuilding together, which it has a parallel with a different take from parts of Shin Godzilla, where some of the government people are talking about, this country was made on scrap and build over and over again. And like, here's an example of that, but in a less cynical manner. And also on the subject of children representing hope for the future, I discovered in my reading that the guy who plays Koichi Shikushima, who is called Rianosuke Kamiki, he was a child actor who had several roles in multiple animated movies, including several Ghibli films. He played show in Arietti, which is the boy who takes Arietti in, who was played by Tom Holland in the American dub. And he was, when he was born, he was extremely fragile, he had a very slim chance of surviving. And he continued to be, his mother continued to be told by doctors that he was either going to die at various points, or that he was going to be permanently disabled. And she decided to get him into acting so that there would be a permanent record of his existence on the earth. Oh my god. That's so dark and sweet. Yeah. And to your point of like his child acting, other things he's done, he played character Tadashi Eno from a 2005 movie called the Great Yokai War. We covered it on the podcast. And also, he was in common writer Otuto in 2001. He was a 2003 opera ranger, which you would know as the power ranger's Dino Thunder Blue Ranger. So like he's been in a lot of this stuff. And even to this day, like he's a writer, he's an novelist, screenplay writer, he's a radio host and a photographer. Like he does, he wears a lot of hats and he's really damn talented. The saying that the doctors were determined he was not going to stick around. He was quite keen to prove them wrong. He's doing a lot. I took that personally. Yeah. One of the most intense scenes is after he's faced down Godzilla and been unable to kill it. And they just about managed to escape with their lives. And he's presented with the prospect of going back into this and just looking at his failures. And he just starts screaming. And Noriko has to, has to try to comfort him and bring him down from it. And he expresses something along the lines of an unparaphrasing here that they are just ghosts that he died on that island at the beginning. And these are just the last dreams, the fantasies of a dying man. And that this isn't real. Yeah, because he expresses that earlier when he has the nightmare of revisiting little island as well. The paralleling or, you know, multiple examples of yeah, that PTSD and survivors guilt and that like Godzilla is from in the movie, he feels like he can't escape it and that he was never meant to live. And so throughout the course of this, you know, in three parts and whatever, right, the first faking mechanical troubles, then not firing on Godzilla on Odo Island and now here again of like he somehow survived the on the boat against Godzilla. And like, yeah, it's just like he just constantly feels this. I'm not supposed to be alive. So maybe I'm actually not. Yeah. And it's that is in conflict with a government that told him the only thing you're good for is to die. Die. And yet, he failed to do that. He's like, keep telling him live. His parents gave him a letter when he went away to war saying just come back alive. They're not asking anything else from him. Just come back alive. Noriko says to him at one point, I forbid you to die when he goes out on the mind cutting ship. These these people who are showing him through their their actions and their words, you are good for more than that. You are, we love you and we want you here, we want you to stay. And that eventually becomes something that he has to hear it over and over and over again before it takes. But yeah, that that that motif of something happening where he feels like that was his moment where he should have died. It happens over and over again. It's it's Noriko pushing him out of the way into the alley when Godzilla hits Ginza. It's the all of the moments that we've already said that he keeps coming up against this. I should not be here and yet. Crystalized in his roar of despair after Noriko is blown away as this black rain starts falling and he's standing in front of Godzilla who himself is roaring at this mushroom cloud. It's haunting in a lot of ways. This whole film is is kind of a catharsis. You could feasibly make this the last Godzilla film in terms of that it bookends the series with the first one. Yeah, and it did a lot of things that were considered like you for a long time like you can't do that like Toho has very specific rules. We talked about that, you know, what we've covered previous monster verse movies of like things you can and cannot do with Godzilla. And until this you can't go before 1954 because that's the origin point. And but he he was able to convince them like, no, no, this is a story worth telling and convince them to do so. It's also the first time Godzilla has ever been a period piece of movie. It's always either been a contemporary or set in the future of some degree or another or whatever. God's, you know, on Odo Island, he's not eating people, but he's still biting people and then tossing them. That was always like, you know, they never liked him directly targeting individual people per se like that. And doesn't end there like, he doesn't eat people. So there's been a lot there's a lot of things that he did with this movie that are like, they were taboo or like the third rail that you don't touch for the character for a long time. But, you know, it's something that I've really loved about this current era of things, where we have both the Monsterverse and what's called the Raywa era and from Toho and everything. Not everything has been great. But into the Raywa era begin. So some people will split the Monsterverse as a separate era from the Raywa era. I don't. So for me, it starts with G for Godzilla 2014. But for people who do split it, Shin Godzilla is the start of it in 2016, two years later. I just think it's silly to try to split the two things, especially when they're happening concurrently. And there was only a two-year difference between the start of one and the start of the other one. But, you know, they have allowed, especially with Toho stuff, not all of it has been great. It's like the Netflix animatrology in my opinion is god awful. But they have allowed people and they have allowed creative teams to do something different with the character and do some different with the universe. Godzilla has traditionally, Toho has traditionally always been very protective of him since the 80s. And very much of a like, you know, they don't like necessarily introducing a lot of new monsters because it's, you know, much more financially safer to just keep bringing Mothra and Kidora and Mechagodzilla into them. And so those those monsters have the most iterations throughout the eras and everything because they're like, well, ticket sales and doing great, shove them in there. That'll maybe boost it a little bit, but it stagnates the creativity and it, you know, playing it safe only works so long. But this era has they've really kind of, especially between Shin and this, they've allowed the creative people in charge to do something bold and different with it and be willing to experiment and work outside the box and everything and look at the results of it as a for a, you know, Shin didn't win any international awards, but it cleaned up in the Japanese film stuff. And it was also one of the highest grossing ones from Toho because of the success the sleeper success it had internationally. And then here with -1, same thing, it was only going to have like a week or two international theatrical run, that ended up being six weeks long as results are just the popularity of it, which then spurred it to win a goddamn Academy Award. So like, as I'm not, you know, I'm not, I don't praise the Academy or anything, but like good recognition and that makes a statement about it. And it, I hope this continues to push Toho to be willing to let the creative teams do what they want to do with the character. It's, that brings to mind the Daniel Craig bonds, which did a whole bunch of things that weren't done before that. And there were a bunch of bond fans pushing back saying they didn't like it. And they wanted the, the old Roger Moore time days back. And I, like, as soon as it started reverting to type, I lost interest. And as soon as it started being brave again and, and breaking new ground, I got my interest back for it. And it ended magnificently doing a thing that I don't think any of us really expected. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. It ultimately, I have a lot of time for fandoms who are flexible and go, you know what? The, the, the most diverse movies are getting Godzilla some traction in the west, which he never really had. Like we, they've not been able to do that before. So that's good. Mm hmm. Yeah. And again, we, we, this is the first time ever that as fans of Godzilla, we've had more than one source of content. It's always just been Toho or in between the mid 70s to the 80s, you know, there was the Hanna-Barbera cartoon, which, you know, whatever, and go like that. Yeah. But that wasn't Toho, but Toho wasn't making Godzilla movies at the time. And then, you know, they end the Hase era in 95 and then they met the Roland Emmerich 98 happens and they immediately pull back the rides. They're like, nope, you fucked up. We're going to do it again. And like, we hate it so much. We're going to kill Zilla as a symbolic gesture. Oh, yeah. Cause it was, that was supposed to be a three movie deal. And they went, nope, you did it all wrong. We're tearing up for that. And then the next year in 1999 was Godzilla 2000, starting the Millennium era. But like this is the first time. You're watching Independence Day, if I had to pick a director to do a Godzilla movie for 1998, at the time, I probably would have said Roland Emmerich, which is why he was picked. Yeah. It's exactly why it was because of Independence Day. Yeah. Because, you know, why, you know, yeah, Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith and Bill Pullman. So who do you get? Matthew Broderick, and then a Simpsons voice actor and some nobodies and Jon Renau. Like one good one in there, right? But this is the first time that we've ever had a plethora of content coming from more than one source. So there's actually a variety to it, which is that we're aware of. Yeah. It hasn't been like this since the Kai Jibun of the 1960s. So, you know, and on time that spurred on other things that have been happening, you know, internationally as well, you know, uh, Thailand just the other year came out with a really nice short movie, The Host or The Lakes. Sorry, The Host was from South Korean 2006. Yeah. There's been, you know, colossal, which you guys covered in week cover from 2016 with Anne Hathaway. Yeah. Like, obviously, Pacific Rim and, but it'd be nice to have a sequel to that one day. I don't know what you're talking about. There is no Pacific Rim sequel. There is no Warren Bossing say. Nice. Nicely done. Julie, get the sequel to Pacific Rim. What do you mean? There's no sequel. Right. Yeah. It's just nice. And unfortunately, the fandom like most fandoms are inflexible and stupid. Yeah. It can be quite tiresome, liking Star Wars or Star Trek or Doctor Who and, or anything trying to find any content that is not just ragebait content. I mean, I'm not looking for content. I'm looking for analyses and things that are joyful. I found the other day one particular channel, I won't say his name, is a particular bozo who does a lot of Disney have killing Star Wars. And I just looked at all of his videos for that. I didn't watch them. I looked at the thumbnails for all of his videos for the past year. And then I just took four screenshots of scrolling down through all of those. And then I combined those four screenshots. And it was just the sea of red and white text and women pulling faces and saying, this is bad. This is terrible. Audiences hate this. Disney attacks the fans are Star Wars is dead. Disney are killing Star Wars. And I just thought, if you were actually someone who loved Star Wars, one of these videos would be about how good Star Wars is. Yeah, but just forget, we're in a day and nowadays, especially in America, where your political ideology overwrites everything else about you because people tie their identities to it too hard. Because people are stupid in the worst. The political ideology is hating their political opponents. That's not a stance. They think it is. That's the problem. You're right, but that's not how they see things because they're stupid and people are the worst. Yeah. [Music] [Music] [Music] Recently, I re-edited the original Gojira to make it a little faster and lighter for the sake of Willow, for whom focusing that long on something dark and depressing is very hard. They have ADHD, autism, and all kinds of things with letters. I did the same for the daft old, creaky kaiju movies, like some of them, like the 1964 version of King Kong vs. Godzilla, which we saw just before this. It's silly. Along with the original 1933 King Kong, the 1976, and Peter Jackson's 2005 film, which quickly rose to the top of Willow's list. Will I really liked that version? Along as your edited-down version of that, over three-hour escapade. Two hours. All right. It's fair. I really like it. I got rid of almost all the messing around with Jack Black, because that takes up an awful lot of the film. The whole, like, "I'm gonna make this film." The whole first hour of that movie is like 15 minutes in the original. It is over-indulgent. I would definitely recommend checking that one out to Dan, since you like kaiju stuff. I might actually, because when we covered the 2005 Kong, I hadn't revisited in the wild, it's like, "Oh yeah, I don't like it in anywhere near as much as I used to." In fact, I kind of really, in fact, I kind of dislike it because of how self-indulgent it is, how... I don't understand how you, I understand you're trying to be devoted to how the original portrays things, but really, you're gonna make somehow, you're gonna make the racism of the natives somehow worse, but try to give a different explanation for it, but it's still worse than in the 30s. As I edited at least three four versions of King Kongs, the Toho version as well, each time I was like, "Right, the main thing that it needs to have almost all of it gone is the friggin' Skull Island natives, because nothing is kind, nothing is reaching out. The best, by far, is Kong Skull Island with the Iwi." Absolutely. But when I delved into Godjure in 1954, now in 2024, I saw the obvious parallels between Dr. Serizawa in that film and Jay Robert Oppenheimer as presented in Christopher Nolan's biopic. It's rather appropriate since his movie Dunkirk may well have had some influence on -1, especially in the Civilians acting, when they aren't sure the military will help at all. As an exercise... Oh yeah, by the way, Yamasaki also was a big fan of Oppenheimer coming out to the last summer as well, and he was met Nolan again in the officer and was like, "That was great." Okay. But as an exercise, this was enlightening. It laid bare a strange and potentially unwarranted empathy with the moral dilemma of the man who helped design the atomic bomb. But look, why does Godjure act sympathetic to the creator of the oxygen destroyer, who's freaking out about the fact that he's made the oxygen destroyer and it's going to fall into the wrong hands, and all of this information's in his head, and he's the one who made this. I am become death. The very American whose bomb was brought to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wreaking the very devastation that would soon inspire the Godjure, that the film somehow finds room in its heart to consider a Japanese analog for Oppenheimer. That's what the first film is. It's an exploration of how terrifying that man-made man-triggered weapon, as well as those who lived beyond the blast radius. How terrifying it was. It ponders questions not so much the why or even the how, but the when these atrocities occur, and it is too terrifying to place a human intentionality behind that. That's why in the American version of Godzilla in 2014, it was firmly analogous with natural disasters rather than intelligence. When a shadow beast is created in the absence of a rational reason for so much death, all that is left on the table is to empathize with the survivors, with the guilty and innocent alike all tarnished by something all-powerful. In effect, God himself, he who sends the hurricanes and tsunamis. Godzilla himself was both symbolic of the nuclear destruction and of nature walked into fury by mankind's grasp for supreme power. He is both villain and unlikely anti-hero, something alive and pitiable, thinking and feeling. That's why the third act, when Serazawa takes the oxygen destroyer down, has a funereal air to it. And in -1, it feels like some subcultures in Japan are prepared to look further back into their history to celebrate the people and the collective determination to survive whilst admonishing an ancient man-conceived cause of incalculable cumulative loss. He is a looming mushroom cloud and the boiling rage and frustration behind reprisal for violence, lurking under the surface, a vast ghost of the elements. Very well said. Thank you. That makes this entire film seem incredibly heavy and it is, but the ending is such a catharsis and such a triumph and such a joy that just keeps on giving, that it feels like one of those stories where they knew they were going to be able to relieve the pain and the stress and the pressure of everything they heaped on you. But up until that point, they had to earn that. For sure. And, you know, part of the reason we don't have that in the original 54 is that it's so close to me. Yeah, it's still nine years. They don't know how it's necessarily going to turn out and everything. And the only thing I would add to what you, your nice thesis on there is that, you know, Gatsal also in 54 is also just the tears of war, which is also still reflected here. Not just the nuclear bombs, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because everybody involved in that movie from the producer and director down to, you know, production assistants and the person holding a boom mic, all of them experienced it, right? Because again, nine years before is when it ended. So everybody had a personal connection and a personal loss to it. So, but everything you still said was right on point. Some just sort of behind the scenes stuff, like the visual effects stuff was a 35 person team with Yamasaki being the supervisor of it because he directed, wrote, and supervised the visual effects for minus one because he started off doing like mental work for production studio and doing effects work and then went and then eventually was like, hey, you know, this has been really cool and everything. But there's no like robots or spaceships or monsters in these movies that I'm doing. So if I want that, I'm going to have to make them myself and so started becoming a writer and then a director and everything. I love this guy so much. Yeah, he's he has a he just turned 60 earlier this week and he has a child like whimsy to him in certain aspects and everything because yeah, you talked a lot of times at length about like the the process of the post-production and visual effects and he wanted everybody on one floor. So they weren't on multiple floors so that he would just be in a chair, you know, with a chair with wheels and just roll from station to station at someone's like, I need to look at something or I've got a finished shot here or whatever and with just roll from available. Yeah, and was there all the time with his 35 person team and everything. So and like he he and he had to do hands-on. He learned how to plant grass and trees in visual effects by doing this movie as well because like sometimes you didn't have the time of the man power. So all right, I roll up my sleeves and do it myself. So he learned some stuff doing stuff at home. He talked about filming, you know, a lot of there's a lot of visual effects of this movie, six hundred and twelve, six hundred and ten shots and it took eight months for the post-production visual effects for that. They did for the boat stuff, film on boats in the sea and he talked about how problematic that was having never done that before and other people. He's like, I'm right about the production of Jules. It seemed like it'd be a dawgle. Right. It's just like, oh, this is actually a nightmare to do. This is terrible because like the later stuff on the warships later on, that was all done on a set and only like a small section of a ship or just the bridge of a ship which through doing things like our committees and pal ship Yamato, he knows how to build the bridge of a ship but like the the hull of it, he would only have sections and would reuse it for all the different ships and just change a couple things on them and then have a crane doing the Star Trek style thing of like having the crane move in one direction and have the cast sort of, you know, push themselves and weave in the opposite direction to make it seem like the waves crashing and everything very Star Trek style because, you know, in Hollywood you put things on hydraulics and make the thing actually move and they're like, we don't have a budget for that. So there's a lot of interesting behind scenes stuff with all of this stuff. One other thing I enjoy is one of the destroyers at the end is called the Yuki-Kase. It's the main one that the main crew is on for the final mission. That is also an actual ship and it's called the Fortunate Ship Yuki-Kase because it was in the Battle of Okinawa where the battle ship Yamato got taken out and it was like one of two ships that made it back and also throughout World War II had a history of like, like Koichi here, it should have been destroyed but survived. The nice little parallel between a ship that makes a little bit of appearance in here and even some of the themes of the main character. Yeah, I love how they held back on the doodoo doodoo do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. They just, they were like, it's coming, just just we got to wait till it's valid. That wasn't even supposed to be in there. No, Kisaoto is the composer for this movie and Yamazaki worked with him for quite a while on a number of different things. But he was excited for this and sent him a lot of like, temp and scratch tracks, most of which survived to the end but he insisted at that with the beginning of the operation being done, like, no, we need to have the Godzilla theme on here. Yamazaki wanted to film an original piece and Satoshi was like, no, no, this, we need the Godzilla theme here. Yeah, it's like, we need to be there and in Ginza, that's it. You get winning an Oscar and when it dropped finally on Netflix, it became the number one thing on there very quickly. It was also the second most pirated movie of all time when they didn't release it for anybody to watch outside of Japan for an extra month. Which would have been fine if they said anything. Toa's problem is they're bad with communicating to the rest of the world. So it's kind of like Squaresoft RPGs in the 90s. Yeah, but just like, yeah, like you can assume it's gonna show up eventually, but it'd be nice to know an idea of when or just an assurance about it. Enix, RPGs from the 90s as well, we missed a bunch of Dragon Quests. Five wasn't released till the friggin DS in the West, which brings us back to the same director. Yeah, we're gonna do a show on that as well because that is a really, that is to me so far the best video game adaptation of a movie. Aside from Detective Pikachu, it's really close though. Hmm, but okay, best animated versus best live action with animated elements. Wow, Detective Pikachu was actually much closer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit than that Chipmunks thing that Lonnie Ireland did. Yeah, huh. Anyway, can you point some folks in the direction of some of your stuff? Like even if you're not doing the podcast right now, episodes you're proud of that they can get hold of. Sure. The Shin Godzilla ones are gimmy. Well, Shin, and of course Tremors being that you're on it. Well, the first time we cover Tremors, we've covered Tremors three times now on the show actually in different iterations. There was the first time with the main cast and co-host that you and Sharon were on. Then I covered it with my friends Quinton and Leo for Kaiju 101, which I did last summer, which was sort of a top-down condensed chronological order of 14 or so movies throughout the ages within the genre. And then we just I just put out yesterday the last of a Tremors retrospective series where we went and watch all seven. Yes, seven one, two, two, four, five, six, seven Tremors movies. We didn't cover the TV show that only lasted 13 episodes, but that exists as well. Quick sneak peek, watch one, two, maybe four and maybe seven. So avoid three and five like the play and six and six, especially avoid five and six. They are a lot of material to get out of some giant sloth creatures. Yeah, unless you for some reason have unless you have a fascination with Jamie Kennedy, don't watch five and six. And even if you do, still don't. Yeah, well, you can watch him in the far more monstrous son of the mask. You could do that. You in fact, if you do that. Indeed, you could. But yes, the Tremors that you're on and Shin Godzilla that you were also on, it all depends on what's kind of in your real house. That was always the point of the show, is that the genre is not for everybody, but there is something for everybody within the genre. I can always, if a person asks me, what would you recommend to me? What kind of movies do you like in general? I'll find something for you that you're going to enjoy. So folks, I mean, with only this. I'd say you're pretty trustworthy in most other fields, but okay. Yes, that and ideas and places to shop for specific collectibles you may be getting into. Oh God, I am holding the 86 studio series Hot Rod in my hands right now going, this is the best freaking hot whatever, but how the fuck do I get these arms out? Okay, so he looks like the T1000 in that position. I didn't like after he gets blown up. Yeah. I can see how he's supposed to go. Oh, hang on. Okay. No, no, bollocks. We're going to keep this, we're going to keep this rolling until you get it. I'm so close. I just need to slot his like, where does the head go white? Usually between the shoulders above it. Thank you for your sake. You like transforming advice. Okay, I'm going to take a picture of this and show you and you tell me how to unfuck it. Hold on. Sure, I'll try. Are you trying to get him back into robot form? Yeah. Well, does the head not go through that hole between the shoulder? You think, wouldn't you? Dan, thank you so, so much for going on to do this. We would not have been able to go as deep into the hollow earth without you. You know, I'm always happy to be on here, especially in and sort of my few areas of expertise. Did it meet your anticipation and your expectations of us talking about these things? I always enjoy talking with you guys on any number of things. So it's always a fun, and joyous time to be on here. And of course, obviously I could go five hours without anybody else talking about this stuff, but that doesn't make it fun. That doesn't make it interesting for anybody else to listen to. And we're just sitting on the day as just, you know, bully pulping. We will be back next week with the first part of another duet of shows, Psycho, the 1960 Hitchcock Classic. I will also be talking about Gus Van Zant's 1998 remake and the week after, the surprisingly good Psycho II from 1983. And on Halloween, we got Beetlejuice, one of Willow's favorite spooky movies, and Willow is on that show. Until then, I've been Alex Shaw. I've been Sharon Shaw. And Schooled Out. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] School of Movies is funded by Patreon, and our $15 sponsors get credit every episode, so thank you too. 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