Summary
Images of dead fish recur throughoutGodzilla Minus One, but is this imagery just a sign of Godzilla’s rampant destruction or does it slyly foreshadow the film’s ending? Takashi Yamazaki’sGodzilla Minus Onehas been hailed as one of the greatestGodzillamovies ever made. It has the big, bad reptile smashing his way through cities and terrorizing fleeing crowds of people, but it also has poignant social commentary about survivor’s guilt and the nuclear age. It’s a lot smarter than the average monster movie.
Throughout the film, one of the most prominent recurring images is dead fish. Dead fish keep floating to the surface of the ocean and washing ashore. It would be easy to dismiss this as another unfortunate consequence of Godzilla’s destruction, but it’s not that simple.The recurring images of dead fish might actually be a sly bit of foreshadowing hintingat how the humans would defeat the monster atthe end ofGodzilla Minus One.
How Godzilla Is Killing The Fish In The Ocean In Godzilla Minus One
One of the things thatmakeGodzilla Minus One’s Godzilla different from the othersis his power of contamination. This version of Godzilla is capable of contaminating an entire area and giving an unknown kind of radiation poisoning to any poor soul who happens to be in that area at the time. After Godzilla attacks Ginza in one of the film’s most thrilling sequences, the authorities quarantine the area to prevent the spread of radiation and further cases of radiation poisoning.
The simplest explanation for all the dead fish inGodzilla Minus Oneis thatthey were killed by Godzilla’s radiation. The fish got too close to Godzilla while he was swimming around the ocean and treading water, and they were killed by radiation poisoning (much like the people of Ginza).But that’s not the only explanation for the dead fish, and the other explanation ties into the way that the civilian fleet defeats Godzilla in the movie’s final battle.
The dead fish inGodzilla Minus Oneweren’t all killed by radiation poisoning. Most of them were killed by water pressure. They were swimming at the bottom of the ocean, andwhen Godzilla came charging through, he caused drastic changes in the water pressure that ended up killing the fish. This subtly foreshadows the way that the humans will defeat Godzilla at the end of the movie: by dragging him to the bottom of the ocean, then rapidly pushing him back up to the surface.
