Godzilla Minus One - 1 nomination

 

Visual effects

Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Tatsuji Nojima

Post-war Japan is not a great place to live. But the country is slowly recovering from the atomic bomb.  Koichi is a suicide fighter pilot and lives with the shame that during the war, he faked a plane malfunction to keep from dying. While on the small island having his plane checked, Godzilla makes his first appearance which Koichi never forgets. Some time later, he has begun a life and fallen in love, and when his neighbor presents him with an orphan daughter, he and his wife care for the child, much to his chagrin. Godzilla reemerges from the sea killing his wife, and he is left to raise the child. But the government has a plan to destroy Godzilla, and his skills as a pilot call upon him once more to fight the unfightable. He and others design a special plane but they discover that Godzilla may be much harder to eliminate than they thought.

I am not a fan of these films. I find they rely too heavily on visual effects and don't invest enough in the story. I was shocked to have thoroughly enjoyed this film. It is certainly exciting, but the writers invest so much into the story and the characters that the visual effects enhance story without being the only essential element of the story. Godzilla Minus One's title is a hint that this is an origin story film, but actually represents the notion that Japan could not have sunk any lower post-war, it was at "zero" and the monster somehow drags the country into a deeper abyss, bringing it to "minus one." I recommend seeing the film in the original Japanese with English subtitles.