Godzilla Minus Zero review – a rock em sock em slog

The 39^th film to be made around Japan’s most destructive little waddling beastie, Godzilla, has arrived, and unfortunately it’s not very good. Takashi Yamazaki’sGodzilla Minus Zero follows fast on the beclawed heels of 2023 surprisingly greatGodzilla Minus One, which placed the iconic kaiju into the theatre of early 20^th century warfare and, like all good Godzilla films, purred along nicely as agrand metaphor for the dangers of nuclear proliferation. It combined handsome period trappings with some creative and nail-biting action sequences, bringing along some very big bangs for decidedly modest bucks.

Obviously, the sound of box office tills also acted as astarting pistol to ride the tsunami of this little peak in Godzilla fandom, and now we have asequel which is, unfortunately, apale, radiation-blackened shadow of the 2023 film. It offers up much of the same in terms of its mix of eccentric CG set-pieces and more grounded expositional stretches, only this time nothing really hits the same. It all feels rushed and lackluster, like the product of arace to punch out aproduct for adeadline rather than to craft anecessary and worthwhile piece of cinema.

This time around there’s anew hostile force in town, the dragon-like Ghidorah who likes nothing more than to level towns and then pop off to the mountains for alittle nap. Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) is the head of Japan’s aptly-named Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, and is charged with coming up with aresponse to Ghidorah’s reign of terror. He ropes in Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), acrackshot meteorologist, who seems to have been inserted into the film so the makers can tick off the Strong Female Character box.

And then there’s Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), the hero pilot from the first film whose deep-set trauma, and the fact that he now has ayoung kid, won’t allow him to fly again. Initially, he’s brought on as aconsultant, but it’s not long before matters get so bad that accepts his patriotic duty once more to tear up the skies while attempting to strafe the electro-beams of anaffed off amphibian. The action sequences are loud, brash and hairbrained enough to muster aspark of tension, but the ideas to capture and destroy these monsters all seem to amount to creating agiant, intricate trap and just hope the idiots just stumble intoit.

What’s so disappointing about the film is that there are kernels of so many good ideas that are either cast aside or wasted, particularly ajuicy subplot involving ageing biologist Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka). He is initially brought on to help with the effort to bring down Ghidorah, perhaps coaxing Godzilla out of his watery slumber to be employed as aweapon. He initially goes along with the plan, but once we’re shown some flashbacks to the events that caused his trauma, it transpires that he has other plans. It’s by far the strongest and most authentic idea that the film has, and it’s just tossed in there and kinda forgotten in order to get back to the stupid stuff.

One other mood-killer inGodzilla Minus Zero is the makers’ seeming immunity towards the most gloopy screen sentimentalism imaginable. Every big dialogue sequence becomes an impassioned, shouty plea that just goes on and on and on. The desire to want to make asequel bigger and better than the original is understandable, but when you’re forced into clockwatching after having endured what feels like five full minutes of acrying child is just too much. There are some great passages in the film, but their impact is effectively annulled by the deathly dialogue dirges that present as the height of hackwork.