Godzilla Minus Zero

Bluesky

The countdown started with Godzilla Minus One is leading to Godzilla and what will have been going to have come after this - as it is in places divergent, there are secrets of sorts in Godzilla Minus Zero, but how it chooses to manage them is complicated enough that I'll try and respect them.

Know that it's mere seconds before Naoki Sato's score is pushing strings that signal one creature. Eventually these will give way to the brass fanfare for the franchise's namesake, but even names and eponymous outposts get complicated. It's 1949, and Godzilla is defeated, but threats have not disappeared. The Disaster Response Bureau have something to respond to almost as quickly as audiences do, those strings soaring as far and as fast as the monster and then the aircraft chasing it.

Writer/director Takashi Yamazaki builds on what he developed in Godzilla Minus One, these aren't Rogue One nor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but their secret plans and the way they're contained are a different problem. You don't have to worry about which way to go, or whether to, you just have to watch.

You're rewarded for doing so. The first Japanese production to be shot specifically for IMAX, there's plenty big on that big big screen. Sound quality too, that score but also the roars of engines and entities, the crash and smash of arms and armaments, the rumble of rubble. Kozo Shibasaki has frequently worked with Takashi Yamazaki and their partnership hits magical heights here. It's always odd seeing the jump in scale from a horizon flattened by kaiju to a single face, and vice versa, but they're managed well.

Less well managed is timing. We have now the longest Godzilla movie, quite a feat give how many there are, but at times the weight of 70-odd years of history is given over to waiting. Within its place in the ever-more convoluted canon there are flashbacks and addenda, all circling back to the roles of Minami Hamabe's Noriko, Ryunosuke Kamiki's Koichi, and young Sae Nagatini's Akiko. Their human story was one of the roots of Minus One and their continued presence is part of Minus Zero's various arcs.

Much as the prequel before this, and one can at least be thankful that there's not time-travel to further complicate conjugation, there are a few alternate routes. An aircraft is brought back, one of those flying machines is the Nakajima G5N Shinzan. Its origin as an act of military-industrial espionage based upon the Douglas DC-4E is an example of the back and forth that informs what we can now call a set of Godzilla films. They tie back to the original's atomic concerns, but the lenses of post-war and Cold-war and post-Cold-war and Global War On Terror and whatever we're in now, and that litany of different eras could be and is a listing of monsters. Starting with Godzilla is arbitrary, and so Minus Zero doesn't.

Like its preceding film, it is not necessarily a jumping on point, but at this stage trying to identify a route to Godzilla is akin to finding a way into any other massive franchise. One's as well to just start. The seas, after all, begin as single streams. Audiences would be helped by seeing Minus One first, and this may inevitably become a precursor itself to yet another unmodified Godzilla, though there's been no shortage of those, God knows, going back to 1956 and Raymond Burr.

One of the film's various recursions makes an explicit connection between the franchise and the bomb. Ogata (Jun Kunimura) is differently affected than the similarly qualified Oppenheimer but equally obsessed with destructive potentials. The presence of the US armed forces looms large too, and there another of the weaker moments. Strategic Air Command, or at least their staff within GHQ, have an interest in Godzilla. They'd surely not be the only ones, but it's very much a Western perspective to be thinking of the Soviets at a time like this.

In the space that Minus Zero has, though, it potentially had room, for that, for other things. It has plenty to enjoy, to thrill, but to feel like it has both moments missed and moments that could be missed leaves it wanting. In structural terms it seems to skip a stage, but one can't untoss a coin. A sequence of heads might have gone another way but one can't quite fairly lament untold tales. The wider issue is one of pacing, we know various things will turn up, sight unseen, and while there are some surprises some of those are like missing rungs on a ladder. Godzilla Minus Zero does get us to height, but to mix technologies the trouble with trying to thread a needle is that one can end up tied in knots.

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