The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison examines military incursions in GOJIRA -1.0/GODZILLA MINUS ONE (Takashi Yamazaki, Japan, 2023) and FIGHTER (Siddarth Anand, India, 2024)

 PRO PATRIA.

Curious to find Gojira -1.0/Godzilla Minus One, this number thirty plus Godzilla movie getting wide sub-titled release. I can’t go along with the chorus of praise it has received. Roland Emmerich’s 1998 piece of cultural appropriation still remains the most accomplished entry in the cycle and, while I could find some sympathy for the Twentieth Century Japanese items with Kurosawa’s people -Takashi Shimura as white coat scientists and Masaru Satô providing scores – my favourite representation is the 1976 Arkush/Dante Hollywood Boulevard, where on-screen movie director Paul Bartel tells the man in the suit to remember that he represents a tragic figure, the last of his kind alone after thousands of years, but he should also try to stomp as many people and cars as possible.

Writer director Takashi Yamazaki and his lot have taken all this in an unfamiliar direction on the new film, starting at the close of WW2 war in the Pacific, where reluctant Kamikaze pilot Ryunosuke Kamiki lands his plane, bomb still suspended beneath it, on the small Odo Island base the already defeated Japanese Army is using as a maintenance depot, to the scorn of ground crew commander Munetaka Aoki. However, that very night a monster monster rampages through the camp with Kamiki afraid using his plane’s twenty millimetre cannon will get it mad. Well might he worry.

Back in the ruins of his bombed out Tokyo district, his relatives dead, Kamiki forms a blended family with girl fugitive Minami Hamabe and the child which has fallen into her care. Their bare existence is made more secure when he takes a well-paid but perilous job on a rundown wooden minesweeper. (Metal attracts US magnetic mines.) What should the crew encounter but that same prehistoric menace, now able to digest the pair of mines they drag into its mouth – good scene.

Godzilla, mutated and enlarged by the United States' (tinted) nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll can now destroy the heavy cruiser (“the Takao is a beast”) sent to take it out. The government’s decommissioned war ships are unequal to the task and the Americans don’t want to get involved and rile up the Soviets. Godzilla is of course on its way to stomp Tokyo and eat subway trains. It hits the Ginza district, where we know Oishi works.

Now thirsting for revenge, Kamiki joins the only potent force – the Japanese military, betrayed by their nation in the war years (dive bombers without ejector seats). They now form a vigilante army (with a few walk outs) and engage battle. The minesweeper’s rejected scientist comes up with a plan to do in the menace by decompression and our hero is kitted out in a prototype Kyushu J7W Shinden fighter, serviced by rehabilitated Aoki. Big action finale backed by Ifekube’s rousing Godzilla theme.

Down the years, the technicians have now spent a lot of time in the Toho tank and the model work is impressive, though we can’t help noticing that ships’ decks are curiously unoccupied. The monster action scenes, which are the reason for the film, are widely spaced, getting second place to not too involving personal material airing issues like survivor guilt, radiation sickness and, by implication, the pacifist constitution. Thoughtful doesn’t strike me as the way to take these. An implausible happy ending further undermines the shift to serious.

Outside the film’s entertainment credentials, it contains an unexpected emphasis on idea content. We are expected to admire a belligerent ex general who we would usually be the bad guy in one of these and we get another homage to the Zero like Miyazaki’s Kaze tachinu / The Wind Rises.

Considering that this one arrives the same time as Dunki, Siddharth Anand‘s new Fighter, is a film sufficiently accomplished to leave us wondering what we are missing in the way of (traditional Hindi) film from India. There are a whole lot of things you can say about this one. Yes, it is a rip-off of Top Gun Maverick but it’s a whole lot better film with superior aerial combat sequences and more stirring flag waving - the all-time best military funeral or star Hrithik Roshan leaning out of the helicopter holding the Indian Tricolor steaming in the wind to acknowledge the one the cadet is flying from the endangered truck convoy below.

Roshan leaves Tom Cruise in his dust in the military hero stakes – taller, better built, more authoritative. Imagine a dignified Indian Jimmy Cagney or a damp-eyed John Wayne and you’re on the way. Around the year 2000 mark, Roshan rapidly turned into his industry’s leading Sylvester Stallone imitator and, in this one, he wastes no time reassuring his admirers he’s been keeping up his time at the gym, by getting his shirt off under the opening titles.

Squadron Leader Hrithik is, of course, India’s greatest pilot in a time of increased tension over Pakistan housing Kashmir training camps for extremists - not even the full bottle on Koran quotation. Hrithik (Patty lettered on his visor) joins the squadron doing air combat scenarios and spots robust Deepika Padukone, who proves to have spectacular shoulder length hair tucked into her flyer’s helmet. However he has a secret sorrow restraining his romantic urges. Nevertheless they get to share inserted dance numbers (think Grease & Saturday Night Fever), party with the flyers and at dawn he runs her back to her single officer quarters on the back of his motorbike. Their profiles approach only to have an emergency call arrest their impending lip lock. Nothing too much has changed in these.

Turns out that super menacing Jaishih Rishabh Sawhney has launched an attack modelled on the 2019 Pulwama incident, where forty Indian military police were killed in Kashmir. The Indian response was their Balakot air strike, of which we get a spectacular recreation, where Sawhney is injured, his blood-filled eye making him even more sinister. An informer, his identity concealed in a black chador, fills in the I.A.F. briefing. He is not what he seems.

This one emphasises the Indian government’s restraint in the face of the atrocities committed by militants based in Pakistani occupied Kashmir, with the Indian Air Force responsibly respecting the invisible LOC demarcation and avoiding civilian casualties.

Hrithic is found guilty of recklessness and transferred to Hyderabad air training facility as an instructor – impressive scene of talking down the beginner-girl pilot, whose first landing is jeopardised by an unexpected crosswind. He also finds time to use his famed charmer smile and sort out Padukone’s stressed family situation.

However, it’s plot and counterplot with the bad hats wanting to lure the Indian flyboys (& girls) into crossing the border to a trap, using Hrithik’s shot down pilot mates as bait. This one runs to the ultra-sadistic, with the crazy cutting off one pilot’s fingers before they send him back in a body bag. Of course the rule book goes out the window with victory demanding our hero be restored to his place leading the rescue and facing off in the sky with his opposite number in the red nosed jet fighter, before we get some more cheer worthy action on the ground.

It’s another Indian popular film where you sit there thinking “Well all right” for the first couple of hours and, after the obligatory interval, you are jolted out of complacency by waves of superior material. Think Mother India, Lagaan or Seventh Horse of the Sun.

The action staging is some of the best ever, outclassing the work we are seeing from the U.S. and China now – the fighter plane paused vertical in the air, the bogus Russian airliner peeling off to reveal the jets its shadow covers on the radar, the shots of the training facilities exploding, our hero’s re-appearance at the crucial moment and the chopper strafing the evil rug heads pouring out waving automatic weapons. Director Siddharth Anand is a specialist in these military spectaculars. If it wasn’t so stirring you’d think it was ridiculous. Well, maybe it still is a bit ridiculous.

Of course overriding such considerations, is the question of putting such a persuasive film into the market to endorse military incursions spurred by religious differences. Ukraine, Palestine, Iraq make uncomfortable comparisons. The film has already been banned in most Arab countries but Viacom and Netflix have money in it, so Fighter looks headed our way after its brief theatrical showing. 

The consistency of the pattern – films from the U.S, China, Japan and India, often made by people unaware of the others’ existence – is not a little disturbing. The message is clearly that the only way to prevent people, with an outlook that doesn’t match your own, building nuclear refining plants, training blood thirsty insurrectionists - or at very least stomping on your coastal cities - is to send out military hardware manned by sexy characters in uniform. That this will play with unsophisticated target audiences is disturbingly possible.

There is a gloomy kind of comfort to be had in comparing these with productions made around the world near the 1930 mark, when the Anti-War movement was at its most vocal, films more thoughtful and better than this batch of of gung ho actioners – Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Eagle and the Hawk, Les croix du bois/Wooden Crosses, Niemandsland/Hell on Earth, Kameradschaft. A steady stream of serious, reasoned and master-crafted product preceded the greatest military calamity in history. Can’t help but hope no one is listening this time either.