Godzilla Minus One: do the subtitles ruin it for skeptics?

I showed Godzilla Minus One to my friend Sam for the first time. I think it was my favorite movie of the year when it came out. Sam's verdict afterward was simple: it was so good.

Godzilla Minus One (2023), starring Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe, was a detour from the run of X-Men films Sam and I had been working through. I picked it because the sequel, Godzilla Minus Zero, was about to open in theaters. I also knew she would get emotional, because I did when I saw it in a theater.

Sam expected to hate the Godzilla Minus One subtitles and forgot they were there

Sam admitted she was annoyed at the start, and not because I put this on ahead of X-Men. She had told me "I hate movies with subtitles," and she figured she would be reading the whole time. With this movie, though, you forget you're watching subtitles. She also said the acting was so good.

She also hadn't expected to be moved. She thought it would just be scary, and instead it got to her emotionally.

The characters make Godzilla Minus One more than a monster movie

As I told Sam, you forget it's a Godzilla movie because they set up the characters so well. There's a bit of everything in it: a love story, horror with Godzilla, and elements of a war movie, a family movie and a friends movie, with kids in the mix too.

The setup carries all of that. The pilot dodges his kamikaze post because he wants to live. Mechanics beg him to shoot the creature, he doesn't, and they all die. He holds that against himself. When he gets back, everyone on the island is dead, a woman makes him feel bad for ditching his post, and he runs into another woman who has a child with her. Despite all those threads, the point made in the discussion was that it flowed so well, with not one moment of wondering what was going on.

If you don't care about the characters then it's just a monster movie. With some monster movies I don't care about the humans at all. This one is different. It's about the emotional throughline and loss. The feeling in the room was that anyone who isn't invested in these characters should "check your heart."

Godzilla Minus One tricks you more than once

Spoilers follow. The film fools you a couple of times. You don't know the woman survives, but she does. You think the kid is going to wind up dying, and he doesn't. You think the pilot is going to fly into the creature's mouth and blow himself up, and he doesn't. Sam thought that when he flew, he was done.

For the most part, it's a pretty happy love story. The line "Is your war over now?" came up as a great line. Then there's the ending: the woman has something on her neck that at first looked like a tattoo. Earlier, the film established that pieces of Godzilla were scattered everywhere, which fed the idea, raised in the discussion, that Godzilla is regenerating under the sea.

Why I think Godzilla Minus Zero is just as good

A longtime regular, Ed, told me when this came out that I had to see it because it was a very different kind of Godzilla movie. I like Godzilla movies, but I missed the screening. So I took my daughter for her birthday. I think she was 11 or 12 at the time, and she loved it.

Without spoiling anything, Godzilla Minus Zero is just as good, and some people say better. The second one is really good, and if you wind up sneaking out to a theater to see it, I'm not going to blame you.