Back in B&W: "Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour"

It was around this time last year that Takashi Yamazaki's creature-prequel Godzilla Minus One came from nowhere to make several critics' year-end lists, including my own. Now it receives the decolorised treatment previously afforded modern classics Mad Max: Fury Road and Parasite, both to keep the revenue stream flowing and to better fit with the 1954 original into and off which it fed. Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour, which has its UK theatrical debut this weekend after premiering on Netflix earlier this year, is primarily a matter of contrasts. The rubble to which the Japan of December 1945 had been reduced - and reduced by man, not monster - appears doubly bleak in stark black-and-white, which makes it all the more buoying when our guilt-wracked, grief-stricken hero (Kamiki Ryunosuke) sets sail on the high seas; the latter now represents light and space, and aboard the rickety, vulnerable wooden boat with the lopsided supporting characters, we again witness humanity knitting itself together, after years of being torn and blown apart. Among the things we can do that buildings can't: adapt, rebuild, maybe even learn from past mistakes.

Blowing up mines from a safe distance generates spectacle without suffering, and a pleasing sense of tidying up after a man-made mess. As I said at the time, Minus One is a movie whose presiding spirits are Ishiro Honda and Marie Kondo, being both grand in its gestures and repercussions, yet delicate and even restorative in its handling. We might well see the film's pacifism, signalled by the decision to make the hero a kamikaze pilot who bailed out of a wartime deathdive, in a whole new light after a further twelve months of atrocities across the Middle East; as one of Yamazaki's sage elders notes, in a line that really does jump out at you this time round, "not being part of a war is something to be grateful for". Otherwise, as much reflection on the past 75 years of Japanese life as it is 70th anniversary renewal of Godzilla, streaking its elaborate design with raw stabs of emotion, it remains a good, stirring, crowdpleasing movie, however you shade it. Nearing the end of a year in which the American studios have continued to step away from comparable mythmaking - the honourable prequel Furiosa aside - this Godzilla roars back among us as a lesson: in IP and VFX management, yes, but also civics, leadership, solidarity and basic human decency.

Godzilla Minus One/Minus Colour opens in selected cinemas from Friday, and is also available to stream via Netflix.