This article contains spoilers for Godzilla Minus One.

Godzilla Minus One is an exceptional movie. But Toho's monster film fits in perfectly with the slate of blockbusters that have dominated the box office in 2023, movies that have been defined by their earnestness. Before we get into that,though, we need to turn back the clock to the summer of 2022.

Top Gun: Maverick's utter sincerity seemed like the kind of blip that might appear on its hero's radar. When the long-awaited sequel released in May of last year, it felt like a major outlier in the theatrical ecosystem. It wasn't winking at the audience. Tom Cruise didn't make jokes to undercut the stakes, and there was no ironic meta-humor about its status as a lega-sequel or tortured plotting to get ahead of the savvy modern audience. Maverick played it straight and was one of the biggest successes of the year, across demographics, because of it. The refusal to be knowing and cynical and shrewd left room for heart and the power of expected, but perfectly executed, emotional beats.

That film's anomalous success proved to be less of an anomaly when the only 2022 film to surpass it at the box office was Avatar: The Way of Water, another film that took its stakes completely seriously, and reveled in the grandeur of its world. Taken together, those films felt like a turning point and, this year, the tides turned even further.

You can theorize about why Barbie and Oppenheimer were so spectacularly successful from a hundred different directions. Both were the work of filmmakers with vision. While neither is wholly original, they weren’t entries in an ongoing franchise either, so both could be enjoyed without prior knowledge. Both were well-executed, with tactile production design and cinematography that elevated the material. But, sincerity is also a massive factor in their success. Barbie is much more self-aware and referential than Oppenheimer, but Greta Gerwig is incapable of making a movie that doesn't wear its heart on its sleeve, and Barbie was no exception. There was real pathos among the Snyder Cut jokes and 2001 spoofs. It blended the meta humor of the past 15 years with the sincerity that defined older Hollywood blockbusters. Oppenheimer, though entirely different in tone, was similarly willing to take its subject matter seriously. It co-starred an Avenger, but its protagonist took his monumental task on without quips, and felt the guilt for the consequences of his actions without comic relief.

Godzilla Minus One is the 37th film in the Godzilla franchise.

The other movies that found success were often similarly sincere. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 ends with a tearjerker dance sequence set to "Dog Days Are Over" and devotes much of its runtime to the tragic backstory of its talking raccoon lead. John Wick: Chapter 4 — like the other films in the series — takes the absurd rules of its world completely seriously. Though some of these films are comedies, all of them allow you to buy in fully to the stakes of their worlds and the inner lives of their characters. GOTG 3 and Barbie have jokes, but they don't prevent either from landing an emotional wallop.

Even among this crop of movies that are moving the needle away from sarcasm and toward sincerity, Godzilla Minus One stands out. Though recent blockbusters and would-be blockbusters have often incorporated the multiverse and the frantic pace and sprawling cast of characters from different timelines that it allows for, Minus One is stubbornly focused on one specific time and place — Japan in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 — and unfolds its story at a deliberate pace across its two hour and five minute runtime.

It begins with protagonist Kōichi Shikishima, a kamikaze pilot who has falsely claimed there is something wrong with his plane in order to avoid certain death in the cockpit, watching as an entire group of mechanics are wiped out by Godzilla. As Shikishima returns to Tokyo, in rubble after air raids, he forms a makeshift family with a young woman and a child she found and took in after the bombings. Shikishima takes on a job detonating mines and is befriended by the three other men on his boat. As he does, he is haunted by the cowardice he displayed in retreating from his duty and not shooting Godzilla when he had the chance. He can’t allow himself to be happy until he has proven to himself that it wasn’t a mistake that he survived or died trying.

Minus One spends a lot of time on build-up. Though we see Godzilla in the first ten minutes, another hour passes before the giant lizard appears again. In the interim, the film is getting you fully invested in Shikishima, his intense emotional anguish, the friends who care for him, and the adopted family he can’t bring himself to fully commit to, despite loving them deeply. Minus One, apart from one beat, isn’t unpredictable. But, like Top Gun: Maverick, it slowly lays out the building blocks of its story, gradually assembling them into something formidable.

When Shikishima finally takes down Godzilla, we care deeply because the filmmakers have taken care to make him feel like a real person. That takes time, but the payoff is that I — not a big Godzilla fan before this — teared up four separate times while watching the movie. That’s what sincerity, when paired with expert craft, can achieve. It can make you feel things that would be impossible to feel if the reality of the film was constantly undercut with self-aware quips. Minus One believes wholeheartedly in its stakes and I’m encouraged that it isn’t the only blockbuster movie this year to have the guts to do so.

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