Takashi Yamazaki<\/a>.\u201d That\u2019s a sign of how much the movie\u2019s visual effects emanate directly from the imagination of the filmmaker. He\u2019s writing, he\u2019s directing, and he\u2019s orchestrating spectacular gargantuan action paintings of beasts in motion. He\u2019s an artist of larger-than-life pop horror.<\/p>\n\n\tWe\u2019ve seen countless monster duels in kaiju movies (old and new, good and bad, Japanese and American), but Yamazaki, who rebooted the genre and took it to a new peak in the revelatory 2023 retro kaiju classic \u201cGodzilla Minus One,\u201d works with a quality that none of the filmmakers of recent decades has summoned: a fairy-tale innocence, an immersion in the annihilating heavy-metal poetry of Godzilla \u2014 the way the destruction of a city can become a spectacle out of a dream (which is to say, a national nightmare). In \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero,\u201d when Godzilla and King Ghidorah go at it, it\u2019s more than a WWE match of primeval rivals. It\u2019s a clash of the titans that will reduce everyone in the audience to a wide-eyed, jaw-dropped child.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cGodzilla Minus One\u201d was justly celebrated for its human story, which felt like something out of a Kurosawa movie of the \u201950s. In \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero,\u201d Yamazaki follows through on that, continuing the tale of K\u014dichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), the former World War II kamikaze pilot; Noriko (Minamo Hamabe), who is now his wife; and Akiko (Sae Nagatani), their adopted daughter, who has grown into a verbally precocious seven-year-old. The fate of this family is at the heart of the film\u2019s emotional palette. To battle the creatures, K\u014dichi will go back into fighter-pilot mode, but the services of Noriko will be called on as well. She\u2019s one of the survivors of Godzilla\u2019s 1947 attack who now has bits of Godzilla DNA embedded in her body (which is why she wears an eyepatch).<\/p>\n
\n\tFor a long time, kaiju movies were a semi-joke \u2014 a fusion of the colossal and the cheesy, and the fact that you couldn\u2019t separate the two was part of what gave the genre its unique shlock magic. But Yamazaki transcends all that. His staging draws on our collective nostalgic memory of kaiju grandeur, and it also dignifies the genre by building it on a drama that\u2019s staged with passion and vigor. When did anyone ever talk about performances in a Godzilla movie? But in \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero,\u201d one responds to the high anxiety of Yoshioka\u2019s Noda, and to the magnetic intelligence of Masami Nagasawa as Makoto Aoyama, a meteorologist whose intuition about storms has a hint of the prophetic. Min Tanaka, who plays the professor, is an actor who was born on March 10, 1945, the day of the firebombing of Tokyo (the deadliest air raid in human history), and his courtly but simmering presence powerfully channels the film\u2019s awareness of history. Yamazaki stages a couple of audacious sequences that feel, in their way, like his answer to \u201cOppenheimer.\u201d One is a fantasy of Godzilla approaching Manhattan the way he once approached Tokyo, a chilling vision for any American to behold.<\/p>\n
\n\tAt first, when the Japanese officials think that they\u2019re contending only with Ghidorah, the film\u2019s battles have a tactical stateliness. Ghidorah heads off to the mountains and hibernates, curling up like a giant snake, which makes them think they can bomb him into oblivion, using planes and weapons borrowed from the U.S. But all that accomplishes is to wake the sleeping giant. The sequence in which a half dozen planes battle Ghidorah in the air is grand, eye-popping filmmaking. And that\u2019s just the appetizer, as Godzilla\u2019s return heralds a battle of staggering vastness.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the final section, a plot strand or two gets a bit tangled. The professor has a hidden agenda, and how he ever meant to carry it out remains too abstract to be entirely clear. Yet as key characters are put under fire, we realize how much we\u2019ve come to care about these creature battlers. They\u2019re rooted in a time and place that feels all too real, and this allows the monsters to parade their primitive might in a way that means something. It was a stroke of inspiration on Yamazaki\u2019s part to reset the kaiju genre in the late \u201940s, during the Atomic Age where it is spiritually rooted (the original \u201cGojira\u201d was released in 1954). The creators of the new James Bond series would do well to follow suit. (That\u2019s how Bond could be vital again.) \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero\u201d is destined to connect with a huge international audience, and it\u2019s already clear that this won\u2019t be the last of Yamazaki\u2019s kaiju epics. That\u2019s because the movie proves that when you do it right, what seemed old can become timeless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Of all the criticisms leveled at Christopher Nolan\u2019s \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d (apart from the one I have: that the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":907257,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,152473,344,94007,263203],"class_list":["post-907256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-godzilla-minus-zero","tag-movies","tag-new-york-film-festival","tag-takashi-yamazaki"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=907256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/907257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}