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| Godzilla Minus Zero at Toho Cinemas Hibiya. Photo by Brett Homenick. |
"Yeah, I'm really disappointed, Todd, but it also could have been a lot better." -- The British Bulldog Davey Boy Smith, WWF Royal Rumble 1995
Spoilers ahead. Caveat lector.
On Tuesday evening, November 3, I caught a screening of Godzilla Minus Zero (2026) at Toho Cinemas Hibiya. I didn't see it in IMAX; I saw it at Toho Cinemas' Premium Theater (screen 1), which is my preferred way to see a flick. The last movie I remember seeing in IMAX was Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), and the only thing I remember about the experience is thinking I didn't need to see it in IMAX. I don't get the hype for the format, I don't think movies look good that way, and I'd rather stick to what works.
For all the effort director Takashi Yamazaki put into making this sequel bigger and louder, we end up with a product that is noticeably less-than its predecessor. The movie leans much more into melodrama this time around. The actors are badly directed and resort to over-the-top hysterics to convey emotion. The sheer amount of shrieking and wailing by the principal cast wore me out in a hurry.
I suppose, given how further removed from the end of the war this movie is from the previous one, and the fact that the earlier film ended on a triumphant note, Yamazaki was running out of "trauma" to mine for content and thus turned to cheap, daytime-soap-opera theatrics to recapture the (over-)praised tear-jerking histrionics of the original. It doesn't work. A little screaming goes a looooong way. As promised, the movie sure is loud, just not in the way anybody wanted it to be.
Then there is the American cast. Their performance is as amateurish as any by foreign actors in the entire Godzilla series. Given the Oscar-winning prestige of the first film, and the fact that Yamazaki and Toho are clearly aiming for an international market, it's absolutely baffling that the production cast these performers instead of ones who knew how to act. You'd think winning an Academy Award would lift the series out of its former "crooz miss-eye-uhl" silliness but evidently not.
Weak acting choices aside, the movie often descends into absurdity with images of floating houses, people who are growing Godzilla parts, and ridiculous portrayals of gum-chewing G.I.s straight out of a '40s-era Republic B-picture. Those looking for a "serious" Godzilla film will have to keep looking, I'm afraid.
The opening scene is good. Ghidorah's attack on Matsumoto is impressive, but we never see anything that ambitious again. In fact, Ghidorah tuckers himself out pretty quickly and almost immediately goes into hibernation. I'm not sure introducing a sleepy monster to the proceedings is the best way to establish stakes and audience interest. Anyway, we get an unnecessary transformation scene as the creature goes from being just plain ol' Ghidorah to King Ghidorah ... and somehow becomes even less threatening.
The climax takes place in, like, a city block of a decimated Ginza. I'm sure the folks who went into this flick with expectations of bigger and louder SFX scenes, if they're being honest with themselves, were gravely let down by the nothingness of the final battle. The scope is surprisingly narrow, it is badly paced and choreographed, and it is arguably the worst climactic kaiju battle since Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994).
Oh, I forgot about Godzilla. Yeah, the filmmakers did, too. I spent the last three years reading on social media about how the last movie is the best representation of the character and how Yamazaki can handle Godzilla better than any other filmmaker. So you can imagine my surprise when I saw just how bored with Godzilla the sequel is. (In fairness, I was pretty bored with this Godzilla, too.) Ghidorah, King or otherwise, is the real focal point of the story, and Godzilla is an afterthought, a buffoonish second banana who is dragged into the movie to give the audience a CG-animated monster fight.
It's a massive step down from the first film, and I can't begin to understand why Godzilla was built up so much in the first movie only to be met with a shrug in the second. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. I've already spent too much time thinking about this turkey, and I can't wait to move on to better things.
I read about the infamous Hiroshima scene prior to seeing Minus Zero, and, admittedly, I was pretty disgusted by the idea. There's very little I'm conceptually against portraying in a film, so long as it's handled tastefully and appropriately. Thus, the suggestion of depicting the horrors of an actual atomic bombing, which claimed the lives of thousands of civilians in an unspeakable holocaust, as shot-in-IMAX, don't-forget-to-buy-your-Godzilla-popcorn-bucket-at-the-concession-stand mass entertainment was, from my perspective, completely reprehensible and exploitative.
I needn't have given a second thought about it. The sequence is a second-rate Oppenheimer (2023) rip-off by a filmmaker desperate for human suffering to milk. I thought it would be beneath contempt; in reality, it isn't worth mentioning. It doesn't even stand out all that much, as the flick is replete with other scenes scenes of dying hospital patients and New Yorkers who get their heads melted off. Instead of making a bold statement, it gets lost in the shuffle of faceless misery and agony in service of an action movie in which monsters can regenerate their limbs on demand.
Some early influencer reviews compared Minus Zero, in terms of its quality as a sequel, to The Godfather Part II (1974). I mean, is there a Turkish Godfather Part II I'm not aware of? Has social-media brain rot evolved to a point where cliched buzzwords ripped from Letterboxd have totally supplanted reason? At this point, reading an interesting, thoughtful commentary on Minus Zero is about as easy as finding a David Cronenberg movie review that doesn't contain the phrase "body horror."
Hey, for the next one, wouldn't it be cool if Kayoco Ann Patterson won the presidency with lizard eyes and Godzilla spines? She could call herself the Commander-in-Chief of Monsters! Man, they'd have to give that movie all the Oscars.
Seriously, though, send these characters to a mental health counselor and get them off movie screens. Enough already.
