Most of us mark a birthday with cake. Godzilla marks his by flattening something. The original Gojira opened in Japan on 3 November 1954, and 72 years later to the day Toho releases Godzilla Minus Zero, Takashi Yamazaki’s follow-up to Godzilla Minus One, the film that took the visual effects Oscar on a budget that would barely cover a Marvel catering truck. North America gets it on Friday 6 November, when GKIDS opens it wide.
Yamazaki is back as writer, director and visual effects supervisor, which is either a sensible use of resources or a man who simply refuses to let anyone else draw the lizard. The story picks up in 1949, two years after Minus One, with the Shikishima family, and Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe return as Koichi and Noriko. New faces include Masami Nagasawa as Makoto Aoyama, a weather forecaster in the Disaster Response Bureau (a job that must come with unusually alarming forecasts), and Jun Kunimura as Dr Ogata. Toho also bills it as the first Japanese production shot for IMAX. The first teaser sent the King of the Monsters towards New York City, which has rather more experience of this sort of thing than post-war Tokyo did.
The early noise is good, with the usual caveat about who is making it. The film had its world premiere as a Spotlight Gala at the New York Film Festival on 26 September, and its official account reports a long standing ovation from more than a thousand people. Studios rarely announce a polite smattering, but this one comes with a director whose last outing turned a modest Japanese monster movie into an awards-season giant-killer. We covered the red-carpet Ginza premiere, where Yamazaki turned up in King Ghidorah shoes, and are choosing to read nothing into the footwear.
The question for British readers is the usual one. GKIDS has North America, and when the release dates were announced in January other territories were “to be announced at a later date.” We have yet to see a confirmed UK date, which leaves this country in the familiar position of watching a giant monster attack somebody else first. Japan’s opening-week figures should arrive within days, and they will tell us whether Minus Zero can match the record of a film whose title was, in fairness, already the lowest possible starting point.
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