Godzilla Minus One (2023) review

"Cowardly" pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) gets too overwhelmed with fear to sacrifice his life for his country, he encounters dinosaur Godzilla on Odo Island and lives, forms an odd "family" with equally lost Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and orphaned baby Akiko, but then Godzilla becomes stronger after being nailed with an American atomic bomb (oopsie!) so Kōichi and several experienced sailors concoct a plan to basically give the King of the Monsters decompression sickness.  There have been well over thirty releases involving this infamous beast so the main angle for this is focusing on Kōichi's survivor's guilt and shame, except trying to probe an individual character's psychological state in what's fundamentally a cartoon-like action movie is foolish, and then it uses Akiko's wailing (and Noriko's "death") for easy sympathy points.  It seems to be a crowd-pleaser, however, and I admit the CGI is quite good considering the budget - Godzilla's spikes glow blue when he's charging up his "heat ray" (which obliterates the Ginza) - yet I sort of miss the overt "cheese factor" of the earlier movies.