The Big G Meets the Big Apple in First Godzilla Minus Zero Teaser
Go ahead and destroy the financial district, Godzilla.
Godzilla Minus One was a game-changer for kaiju fans. Although they’ve remained consistently popular in Japan, Toho’s Godzilla movies were never exactly juggernauts in America — particularly compared to the supersize box office of their Hollywood equivalents in Legendary’s Monsterverse. Minus One changed all that, starting strong at the Japanese box office before making a slow, but steady ascent abroad amid good reviews and huge hype from fans.
In the end, Godzilla Minus One made a total of $116 million worldwide, $57 million of that in the US — and that’s before the franchise received the ultimate validation of the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the first such win for a Godzilla movie. Not bad for a $10-$12 million picture made with an in-house effects team of 35, a fraction of the hundreds of people that usually work on large-scale productions like this one. And indeed, one of the most impressive things about Godzilla Minus One is the sheer scope it manages to achieve with relatively limited resources, combining multiple styles of blockbuster filmmaking into one thrilling, stirring story.
Suffice to say that the pressure is on for franchise director Takashi Yamazaki, who’s credited as a VFX artist first, and then as a writer and producer in the first teaser for the massively anticipated followup Godzilla Minus Zero. The film takes place in 1949, two years after the events of Godzilla Minus One — don’t think too hard about the math, it’ll only confuse you — and continues the story of former kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his fellow survivors Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and Akiko (Sae Nagatani), who have come together to form a makeshift family in the bombed-out ruins of postwar (and post-Godzilla) Tokyo.
The new trailer opens on that rubble, as well as the voice of an American pilot saying, “if their operation fails, maybe we’ll finally get to use it.” The reference could apply to a few things: The Oxygen Destroyer developed by Dr. Daisuke Serizawa in the original 1954 Godzilla, maybe, or perhaps even an atomic bomb. Directly or indirectly, Godzilla movies have always engaged with the traumatic cultural legacy of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And considering that Godzilla Minus One dealt with the disillusionment that many Japanese people felt in the aftermath of WWII, it’s possible that Yamazaki is confronting that dark chapter in history head-on in the sequel.
Or perhaps he’s giving America a taste of its own medicine, as the final seconds of the Godzilla Minus Zero trailer show the newest design of the ever-evolving King of the Monsters stomping towards the Statue of Liberty. It’s difficult to tell, as it’s filmed from below, but Godzilla seems to dwarf Lady Liberty in the shot. So let’s do some math: In real life, the Statue of Liberty is 92.99 meters (305 feet) tall. And in the last movie, Godzilla was 50.1 meters (164 feet) tall. Does this mean that the Big G had a growth spurt on his way to the Big Apple? Future trailers will tell.
In any case, he’s headed straight across the Hudson River towards Wall Street, which should make the people happy.
