[category]
[title]
It’s a heightened kind of thrill when a film comes from nowhere and takes the world by storm. What comes next can be dispiriting to witness, though, when the inevitable sequel falls flat chasing the old magic. For every Blair Witch Project, there’s a Book of Shadows; for every Monsters, there’s a – shudder – Monsters: The Dark Continent.
And so, to a lesser extent, it is with this underwhelming follow-up to Godzilla Minus One. That 2023 kaiju movie was Toho’s 38th Godzilla flick but somehow still tiptoed in from nowhere, dazzling with its terrific visual effects, emotional storytelling and smart reapplication of composer Akira Ifukube’s iconic theme from the 1954 original. A black-and-white re-release followed, and so did an army of fans gained via its move to Netflix.
But while there’s plenty of lightning in his IMAX-ready sequel, VFX-wizard-turned-director Takashi Yamazaki fails to channel any of it back into the bottle. The monster sequences will leave you slackjawed afresh, but the rest is a slog. And like a diva waiting for an encore, Godzilla doesn’t even appear until halfway through.
Minus Zero picks up a couple of years after the first film in 1949, with Godzilla seemingly blown apart by heroic pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), shortly after eating part of Tokyo. But war-torn Japan faces a nightmarish new monster foe: Ghidorah. It’s a gelatinous extraterrestrial blob that, by dint of gobbling up the local fauna, has mutated into a flying dragon with an appetite for destruction. Part hydra, part chimera, all attitude.
Exhilaratingly, Yamazaki plunges us straight into the maelstrom as another Japanese city bites the dust at the claws of this flapping Smaug. Then it heads for the hills for a snooze and the movie does something similar. Disaster-response director Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) and his team – including meteorologist Makoto (Masami Nagasawa) – hatch a plan to use the weather to fry Ghidorah that goes on for at least three meetings too long. There’s also some half-hearted scheming (and acting) by American military types that has minimal payoff.
Rather than using his kaiju as a metaphor for the atomic age, Yamazaki draws the legacy of Hiroshima into the story, locating scientist Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka) in the ashes of the city, surveying real horrors. Minus Zero is the first R-rated Godzilla film, a monster movie that wants to take the legacy of World War II seriously and even nods to Italian neorealism.
That final showdown, when it comes, is well worth the wait. If only it had been a bit shorter.
Godzilla Minus Zero premiered at the New York Film Festival. It’s in US theaters Nov 6.