For a Godzilla movie, this has a lot of drama about surviving in Japan after WWII…
I understand the enthusiasm this movie had, because it’s like… a real movie? It’s not like those annoying American Godzilla movies? But… it’s hampered by the a low budget, I think. I mean, this looks better than most $200M American super-hero/monster movies, but it still doesn’t look, like, actually good.
Overbite Godzilla.
It’s not the special effects that show the lack of money the most — it’s the action scenes, where there’s supposed to be hundreds of extras running around, getting chomped, but instead there’s like four.
It’s a 99%/98% tomatometer — is that unprecedented?
OK, I wasn’t expecting them to fridge the Manic Pixie Dream Girl to motivate The Failed Kamikaze Pilot to Actually Do Something, and that’s on me — it was pretty obvious that that’s where this was going from the start.
I understand the enthusiasm for this movie. It’s a scrappy little movie that hits all the right notes. It’s quite moving, and it feels like the stakes are on the right level, and the action scenes are really effective — and all those things are things that US action movies usually fail at.
But.
There’s like an hour in the middle there that’s really (content warning: hate speech) boring. Sorry! It’s boring!
The fun parts are really fun, through, and it tugs at all the heart strings in a very effective (i.e. manipulative) way. So… it’s the movie for 2023? But is anybody gonna watch this in the years to come? Dunno.
Godzilla Minus One. Takashi Yamazaki. 2023. ⚂
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