How ‘Godzilla Minus One’ crafted a classic monster movie for less than Chris Pratt’s ‘Jurassic World’ salary
Monster movies continue to be big business in cinema, making it rather fitting that one of the most iconic creatures in cinema history celebrated its 70th anniversary with an instant classic, after Godzilla Minus One showed Hollywood how it was done at a fraction of the cost.
Blockbusters boasting hulking beats levelling entire cities have always held their appeal because it’s one of the ultimate forms of escapism. There’s not a shred of believability about any of them, but there’s also something enticingly elemental about watching skyscraper-sized monstrosities knocking seven shades of shit out of each other on the biggest screen possible.
Each entry in the Jurassic World trilogy cleared a billion dollars at the box office, three of the five instalments of the MonsterVerse soared past $500million, and the other two were far from being flops, and Guillermo del Toro threw giant robots into the mix and reaped the rewards with Pacific Rim, but the other common denominator is that they all present hollow spectacle lacking in story, stakes, and character.
It’s easy to make the argument that nobody cares about humans when they’re not the focus or the main attraction, but Godzilla Minus One made a mockery of those assumptions. Ryunosuke Kamiki’s protagonist Shikishima is a kamikaze pilot who abandoned his orders, which crippled him with insecurities and self-doubt long before he struggles with the PTSD brought on by his first encounter with the titular kaiju.
He returns home and tries to make a new life for himself with a surrogate family after welcoming a woman and a daughter who isn’t even hers into his home, but even then, he fails to reconcile his bright future with his past actions. For Shikishima, his war isn’t over until he exorcises all of the demons he carries with him, easier said than done when one of them is an atomic fire-breathing lizard that towers over the skyline.
American-backed monster flicks don’t have any characters anywhere near as rich or well-drawn, which creates investment at a base level that makes the set pieces all the more effective because people actually care what happens. Did anyone bat an eyelid or cry foul when it was revealed Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire wouldn’t feature the return of Alexander Skarsgård’s Nathan Lind? What about when Pacific Rim: Uprising happened without Charlie Hunnam’s Raleigh Beckett? Exactly.
In an age where reshoots and rewrites are happening constantly on the biggest films, Godzilla Minus One thrived on having a clearly-defined vision. Not only was he the writer and director, but Takashi Yamazaki also served as one of the visual effects supervisors, which saw him match Stanley Kubrick by becoming just the second filmmaker to ever win an Academy Award for the special effects on a movie they also directed.
As a result, the entire team working on Godzilla Minus One knew what they wanted to achieve and how they planned to achieve it from day one, and that sense of community even fostered one of the standout sequences after compositor Tatsuji Nojima shared his pastime of creating water-based digital sequences in his free time, which inspired Yamazaki to expand the scope of the third act finale and have it unfold on the open water to a much greater extent than he initially envisioned.
It’s very rarely anything but tales of woe to emerge from the effects departments on Hollywood’s costliest endeavours, and while the Godzilla Minus One team worked very hard for a very long time to fulfil their ambitions, they weren’t placed under crushing deadlines, exacting schedules, and new footage being thrown their way on a regular basis by a director who kept adding or removing scenes that weren’t present in the first cut.
The budget for Godzilla Minus One was initially reported to be $15m, but Yamazaki denied that figure and said it was actually cheaper. For comparison, Chris Pratt was paid an estimated $14m salary for starring in Jurassic World Dominion, which might just be the worst movie to ever make a billion dollars.
It sounds simple, but as it turns out, all it takes to make an effects-driven monster mash that attains instant classic status is to have a worthy screenplay, strong characters, and a crew on the same page from day one. If Godzilla Minus One was made 20 times over it would still be more cost-effective than a single Jurassic World, and it’s already ten times better on its own.
