Blockbuster: GODZILLA MINUS ZERO

With an ear-splitting roar and an aggressively over-cranked sound mix, Godzilla Minus Zero erupts onto the screen with an enormity fitting its subject. It’s the sequel to 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, Japan’s Toho’s latest reboot of their classic franchise. That film took the guise of a historical epic. Set in Japan immediately after World War II, it finds a broken country of haunted people. If the 1954 original made the title creature symbolic of the atomic bomb, Godzilla here is also the irradiated husk of empire. The devastation of the war sits heavily on the entire picture with its characters living in literal rubble trying to rebuild into a positive sense of personal and national identity. Written and directed by visual effects artist Takashi Yamazaki, it wove its real historical trauma seamlessly into its kaiju spectacle. We sit in the grief of a failed kamikaze pilot and orphaned children and aimless sailors. And then scenes of devastation as Godzilla tramples cities is given greater weight. The project clearly intends to restore to the franchise the original sense of fear and disaster. But we also thrill to sequences like the Jaws-inspired action involving a small boat tracking the big creature. It’s a good popcorn combination for a sturdy blockbuster. Its sequel, bigger and louder in every way, perhaps inevitably finishes the usual Godzilla evolution from “He’s so scary…” to “…and he’s our friend.” 

Much like Batman, the decades of Godzilla storytelling exist on a continuum from serious to silly. Each iteration starts closer to the former and pushes inevitably toward the latter. This one doesn’t go full silly, but it takes some big steps in that direction. It begins with introducing the dragon-like Ghidorah. As our returning cast of characters and some new ones reckon with this massive threat attacking Japan, they come to the foregone conclusion: we need Godzilla to fight it. There’s a predictability to its plotting—the early destruction, failed attempts to take Ghidorah out, reluctant agreement to find Godzilla and get him to join the fight, and, finally, the big battle. But there’s a lot of pleasure to be found in seeing those set-pieces done up well with big spectacle and booming sound. When the monsters are roaring, there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. It’s the human drama in between that’s a bit trying to the patience. It’s as overabundant as it is lacking—the period-piece seriousness shorn of its novelty now this time feeling like a thin layer of po-faced sentiment ladled on top of endless limp melodrama. That’s always a tricky balance to pull off between giving us enough Godzilla and giving us some people to care just enough about to give the whole thing a sense of scale. But the advice I’d give all Godzilla filmmakers is also the biggest reason to go see a new Godzilla movie: more Godzilla never hurt.