The humanistic heroes of the first film return, and so does writer-director Takashi Yamazaki's awesome sense of monster action paintings in motion. Of all the criticisms leveled at Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” (apart from the one I have: that the entire movie is a frigging mess), the most resonant, to me, was the complaint that Nolan had made a mistake by leaving the Greek gods out of the story. He certainly demonstrated that you could make a version of Homer minus the gods; he didn’t necessarily show that it could be done without losing a crucial dimension.
Besides, if you can’t see gods at a movie of “The Odyssey,” where are you going to see them? The answer is: at a Japanese monster movie — more thrilling, by leagues, than “The Odyssey” — where the monsters possess an ominous majesty that’s not of this world, even as they’re in the middle of laying waste to it. In “Godzilla Minus Zero,” which premiered tonight at the New York Film Festival (it opens Nov. 6), there are two oversize mystic beasts: Godzilla, the original kaiju (the character is now 72 years old, proving that 72 is the new awesome), and King Ghidorah, the dragon hydra who made his first appearance in the 1964 kaiju classic “Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster.” Each is a formidable creature, though in both cases it’s more than a matter of epic stomp or gargantuan wing power.
When Godzilla tilts his head up to the sky, gathers his might, and then shoots out a blast of radioactivity that can level a city, it’s an exhibition of transcendent force. And Ghidorah’s heads — which look, up close, like costume figures out of a Golden Dragon Dance — emit orange lightning volts that extend for half a mile. These aren’t mere monsters.
They’re serious movie gods. We’re given a grand vista of demolition, and also close-ups of Ghidorah seen from the point-of-view of Professor Murakami (Min Tanaka), a Hiroshima survivor who’s been doing biological creature research. Godzilla will soon turn up as well, even though he was thought to have been destroyed at the end of “Godzilla Minus One.” (It’s hard to destroy a god.) To save Japan, Kenji Noda (Hidetake Yoshioka), the high-strung, pencil-necked, Einstein-haired director of the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, leads his team in devising a plan that’s got a sandbox-showdown ingenuity: They will lure both creatures to a single locale and goad them into fighting each other.
Whichever one remains standing will be wounded and weakened, and the human forces can then finish that monster off. When you go to see a big visual-effects movie, like something from Marvel, the closing credits that roll on for 12 minutes will feature multiple armies of visual-effects teams (each digital company with its own general). I have no doubt that a formidable army worked on “Godzilla Minus Zero.” But it’s also a movie that features the highly unusual credit “VFX, written, and directed by Takashi Yamazaki.” That’s a sign of how much the movie’s visual effects emanate directly from the imagination of the filmmaker.
He’s writing, he’s directing, and he’s orchestrating spectacular gargantuan action paintings of beasts in motion. He’s an artist of larger-than-life pop horror. We’ve 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 “Godzilla Minus One,” 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 — the way the destruction of a city can become a spectacle out of a dream (which is to say, a national nightmare).
Extract — continue reading at the source.
