Video Mondays: Godzilla Minus Zero: Are Monster Movies Supposed to Make You Feel To the Point of Tears?

I have to admit upfront that I’m one of those weirdos who loves movies that can make me care about the characters and what they are going through. That’s one reason why I kind’a hated “Cloverfield.” All of the protagonists in that film were kind’a self-serving assholes. I love epic tales which can only be told on the biggest screens possible. But even a “big story” with things going “boom” won’t cut it if I don’t care about the struggle that the main characters are trying to over come. This even holds true when the story is about some kind of “dinosaur” tormenting a Post-World War II Japan. How do you get me to care about a story that was first told in 1954 with dudes smashing miniature cities in rubber monster suits? Just switching out the rubber suits for CGI monsters won’t automatically get me in the theater.

2023’s Godzilla Minus One made the spectacle all the more powerful by beginning the story at the end of World War II and a failed Kamikaze pilot landing on a remote island due to “engine troubles” that prove to be false. Things got worse from there. His shame and his failure to meet the moment was the core to the story. The monster was the universe dialing up his horror to an impossible level and making it everyone’s problem and not something that he could hope would go away over time.

This new movie, Godzilla Minus Zero, shows us what has become of this man and his new family two years later and the fact that the problem they thought they solved last time, wasn’t the whole story. And it’s not that “the problem” has just gotten bigger or that they’ve even really recovered from previous trauma. Again, the spectacle is grounded in what these people have already experienced and it gets insanely worse without losing that connection to the individual lives that we’ve come to care about. Oh, and the spectacle is much greater and somehow more visual than what we saw the last time.

I stayed away from trailers or posts online because I didn’t want to be spoiled from having an uninfluenced experience when I saw it on a big screen (at a theater that had the D-Box motion control which is connected the audience’s seating—-yes, it was quite a ride). Because I’m a fan, I didn’t need the trailer for me to seek out the movie to see in a theater (I am thinking that my theater D-Box experience was amazing, but I think I’ll schedule an IMAX ASAP). But not everyone is like me, so here’s the official trailer for the movie. Don’t wait or assume that it’ll be the same once it hits the streamers. See it in a theater, hopefully with an audience of fellow fans. Enjoy (personally, I’ve gotten used to tearing up with complete strangers in theaters… Damn Godzilla!). JBB