博士の助手

Takashi Yamazaki's "Godzilla Minus Zero" is a downgrade from its 2023 prequel. It's disjointed, boring, & unsure what it wants to be. ***SPOILERS AHEAD*** First the monsters: this is a Ghidorah film, not a Godzilla film, who's in it for less than 4 minutes. The final battle is bloody, destructive, but very short. This might be the shortest fight in any Godzilla film. The one-headed Ghidorah is just a 'Game of Thrones' dragon. But the three-headed variant is phenomenal, & the scene where his head splits into three & he first uses gravity beams is incredible. Ghidorah is a threat throughout to Mankind. The potential of it's evolution is glossed over and wasted. The hand-held camera footage of its awakening is great. Godzilla just kind of shows up. No explanation. The secondary villain, the United States gov't is always ever present and looming in the background. The acting is generally alright, but the scripting is uneven, disjointed & full of weird nostalgia towards the first film. "Remember this, here is a version of that" but ad infinitum. There are some very dark elements of radiation scarring, suicide, abandonment, hopelessness, & nationalism that are very well done. The ending is very weird, neither cathartic nor fulfilling. The film simply ends. Certain characters make very odd choices, especially concerning war orphans, & whoever allowed that weird scene at the very end at the 'orphanage' should not ever write again. What was that? Min Tanaka's prof. Murakami is the best part of the film. A man who lost his whole family in Hiroshima doing anything he can to gain vengeance on the Americans who dropped the nuke. His invention rivals the Oxygen Destroyer from "Godzilla" '54. He's phenomenal in the film, and those Hiroshima & New York scenes are brilliant psychological spectrums of his mind in constant battle between hate and grief. What they do with the Godzilla cells is akin to "Godzilla vs. Biollante" which is great. But a lot of the potential is wasted. It's unfortunate. Sigh. Hideaki Anno cameo was great though. In the end, it's an ok film, a quasi-remake of "Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster" but with a lot more soap opera drama. I'd put it as a medicare kaiju film and give it a 7.5 out of 10. Worth a single watch, but it won't be a movie people will return to. The monster/fighting scenes will fit into a 8 minute clip on YouTube, which will be more impressive then the whole from which they were pulled.