G, SPOT ON

Now in theaters:

Godzilla Minus One--To paraphrase Yeats: What rough beast, its hour come round again, slouches toward Tokyo to kick ass?

Who else? This new kaiju flick, from Godzilla's home studio Toho, celebrates the title character's 70th anniversary. Released in the U.S. with minimal fanfare (no screening for critics in my area), this entry tells a standalone story, unrelated to the earlier Japanese or American films, and it feels very different from either series.

For one thing, it's a period piece. It begins in 1945, with Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a young kamikaze, first shirking his suicide mission, then freezing up when he's confronted with the supposedly legendary sea monster at a small airbase in the Odo Islands. This lapse results in horrifying losses. Then when Shikishima gets back to the ruins of postwar Tokyo he's a pariah in his neighborhood.

Over the next couple of years, the guilt-haunted Shikishima becomes the reluctant head of an improvised family after Noriko (Minami Hamake), a young homeless woman, takes shelter in his house with an orphaned baby she's picked up. To support them, he takes a job with an oddball minesweeping crew on a small boat, clearing the leftover mines surrounding Japan. Then one day The Big G surfaces, made gargantuan after being irradiated during the Bikini nuclear tests, and heads for Tokyo.

The monster scenes here are spectacular, staged by writer-director Takashi Yamazaki with panache and a feel for dizzying ponderousness. There are some genuine jolts, too, notably Godzilla's first appearance. Best of all, the behemoth's big scenes employ Akira Ifukube's masterly score from the original 1954 film.

But at some level Godzilla Minus One feels less about monster action and more about Japanese society struggling to come to terms with an almost unimaginable defeat. The big scaly guy seems more like a symbol of the magnitude of despondency that had to be overcome for the country to survive and rebuild. This, along with heartfelt acting from an appealing cast and an effective sense of period detail, makes the film unexpectedly moving.

Having a failed kamikaze as the hero set the story up for an obvious payoff that I found troubling from the first scenes of the film: The perceived need for redemption from the eminently sensible decision not to carry out the lunacy of a futile suicide mission. Here, I thought, is the sort of intractable nationalism that makes for good melodrama, but in real life leads countries into war and horror and misery.

I'm happy to say that G-1 is having none of it; while giving full credit to worthwhile self-sacrifice, the film is resolutely life affirming. "This country never changes," one of the characters mutters, about some governmental folly. "Maybe it can't." But that country did change, albeit at a Godzilla-sized price, and this movie gets at the pained yet exhilarating spirit of that change.

My Kid accompanied me to this film, and after checking out the trailer on the way to the theater, she disapprovingly said "I think they're going to hurt him," him being Godzilla. She was right; the monster is not, here, a long-suffering defender of humankind against some bizarre alien or primal abomination, but a rampaging destructive force who must be stopped. Even his roar sounds scarier; it's not the usual nasal, irritable honk. But even so, I too felt sympathy for him during the efforts to destroy him. Something about that big lizard is lovable, even when he's being a bad boy.