Godzilla Minus the United States
Thirty minutes into Godzilla Minus One, the 33rd film in Japan’s most famous movie series and the first to be nominated for an Oscar, the writer-director Takashi Yamazaki throws the equivalent of a historical-revisionist curveball. Whizzing by in less than 60 seconds, a black-and-white montage flashes at us with the urgent impatience of a newsreel cut for TikTok—classified documents and nautical charts, blipping radar screens and faceless military personnel set to a garbled, quasi-unintelligible voice-over in English and Japanese—all to deliver a jarring message that is nonetheless bracingly clear.
A giant, irradiated monster is racing across the seas toward the Japanese archipelago, slicing through American naval destroyers and sending military-grade Geiger counters into overdrive. The United States is not coming to Japan’s defense—quite the contrary: Toward the end of the newsreel barrage, we see General Douglas MacArthur’s official signature on a Dear John letter followed by grainy footage of the man himself, regally saluting his way down the steps of U.S. occupation headquarters in Tokyo, urging Japan “to
