I sure it will shock few of you to learn that I greatly enjoyed Godzilla Minus One. Even aside from the pleasure of hanging out all weekend with Sandy and Wendy and Rev, and watching lots of junk, the movie itself nearly justified flying down to Dallas to see. Well, I mean, I could have also seen it here, but you get me.
The big question seems to be is it better than Shin Godzilla. First, Shin Godzilla was a marvel. So even having GMO in the conversation is very impressive. I’m going to wimp out and say they are both so good that it probably comes down to personal preferences.
SG had more of a point and certainly more of a general political point, while GMO has it’s post-wartime setting and more involving characters. I’d say the strongest compliment for the latter is indeed that the film remained entirely absorbing even when Godzilla was offscreen for 20 or 30 minutes. That’s a benchmark that many G-films in the past have failed to achieve.
Nor is this to say that the Godzilla segments aren’t great, because they are. Godzilla looks spectacular here in a film that cost less than a twentieth of what The Marvels did. And the film is full of neat little callbacks to the original film, presented with little twists or additions. You don’t have to be a huge Godzilla nerd to enjoy the film, but as with all the better geek movies, there are plenty of additional pleasures to be found for those that are.
I’m made little secret of the fact that I get most of my modern entertainment from Japan. Indeed, Miyazaki’s brand new movie Boy and the Heron hits theaters this weekend, and you can bet I’ll be seeing it. It’s a sign of how generally popular such fare is, though, that Godzilla Minus Zero grossed 11 and a half million dollars this week to come in third at the US box office, with an extremely good $5000 per theater average.
This is especially impressive given that the film is currently only available in a Japanese language version. I think the youngsters’ comfortableness with subtitled anime is probably making such fare more and more accessible to general audiences. However, given the film’s success already, and with theaters starving for things to fill up all those multiplex screens, I wouldn’t be surprised if they released a dubbed version. (Unless, of course, Toho just doesn’t want that.)
