By now the whole world knows the greatness of GODZILLA MINUS ONE (2023), the surprisingly serious and deeply moving WWII drama take on Godzilla that was a surprise international sensation and even won the best visual effects Oscar. Now writer/director/visual effects supervisor Takashi Yamazaki and most of the main characters have returned with the direct sequel GODZILLA MINUS ZERO. Yes, this is one of the rare Godzilla movies where we all would’ve been mad if they didn’t bring back the humans! This time they’re as important as the monster to us.
It’s two years after the end of the last one and I will mark this as a SPOILER just because I hadn’t seen it in advertising, but the opening scene is an attack on Matsumoto City by a dragon who will be given the name Ghidora. It wasn’t until near the end of the movie that I thought oh geez, MINUS ZERO = MONSTER ZERO. Why didn’t I figure that out? This version of the famously jerky monster doesn’t necessarily come from Planet X, but he did come as a blob on a meteor that absorbed animals and used them to create his earth form.
A biologist named Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka, BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL) has a close call with Ghidora and is sent (still dirty from the rubble he crawled out from under) to advise Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka, THE HIDDEN BLADE). Noda was the adorable bespectacled leader of the civilian Godzilla defense force in part -1, now he heads the government’s Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau. The team also gains Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa, SHIN ULTRAMAN), a brilliant meteorologist who blames herself for her dead-on typhoon predictions being dismissed by the powers that be. But Noda believes in her. (read the rest of this shit…)
