Godzilla Minus One

I’m not a Godzilla fan though I’ll admit to a soft-spot for Blue Oyster Cult’s Godzilla. So I came to GMO with mixed expectations. The reviews were sterling. The franchise not so much. And when all was said and done and Tokyo was saved, I leaned toward the reviews. The best parts of Godzilla Minus One almost all happen when Godzilla is off-screen. In particular, the story of a failed Kamikaze pilot and his makeshift family in the ruins of Tokyo could (and maybe should) have stood on its own. Keep the actors, get rid of the monster, and you’d have one pretty fine movie about love among the ruins and the personal price of failure in an honor culture. Put the monster back-in? And you have the rare monster movie where you care about the hero and the even rarer monster movie where you care about the heroine. Is the extended action sequence at the end a let-down? Borderline. GMO both transcends its genre and is somewhat lowered by it. (Netflix)