Takashi Yamazaki’s legendary film Godzilla Minus One is still lingering with audiences even a full year after its release. Recently though during a celebration of the original Godzilla film and the franchise’s 70th anniversary at a panel during the New York Comic Con Yamazaki shared with fans behind-the-scenes stories about Minus One’s pre-production. Specifically, the story that drummed up talk was the film’s narrative and it’s vastly different ending.
For those unfamiliar with the film and its history, Minus One set out with the high goal of returning to the 1954 Godzilla film’s analogy focus on the nuclear bombings. While Minus One shifted toward an examination of survivor’s guilt of such a disaster exploring the impact on both individuals and communities it still focused on that nuclear fallout metaphor.
In the original draft of the film’s script that nuclear fallout would have been the death of the character Noriko, who in the films official ending survives after being caught up in Godzilla’s rampage through the city and is seen recovering in a hospital bed by the protagonist Shinkashima. In the panel Yamazaki said they had decided to let Noriko live to represent hope to keep living for Shinkashima as the first draft had her die in the Godzilla Ginza attack. They had decided when drafting that first script that Noriko’s death would have been a parallel for Shinkashima’s personal devastation in tandem with Japan as a whole country ravaged by war.
While we may never know how audiences would have responded to that ending now Yamazaki and company are proud of the film they produced and are still working on the next Godzilla film from Toho.
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