Coming soon, 5 November 2026: Oh no, there goes Matsumoto

Seen at a screening of Godzilla Minus Zero.

What a hoot!

The movie opens with the city of Matsumoto under attack from a giant creature that looks quite a bit like a dragon - think a more working class Smaug. Armed with a 16mm camera, a scientist named Kanji Murakami (who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima) and his assistant document the creature's rampage through the city. They are able to bring their film back to Kenji Noda and his crack team at the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau.

We learn that this new leviathan came from outer space as a kind of tentacled, clear goo that ate or absorbed the local fauna and grew into the monster that wreaked havoc on the poor Matsumotoans.

Teaming with the U.S. military, a plan is made to deal with the creature, named Ghidorah, who's taking a nice nap after having wrought destruction across the land. A fuel-air bomb proves ineffective so Noda's team attempts to electrocute it. While they're successful in zapping Ghidorah, the electricity does not kill the beast. Not only does Ghidorah shake off the zap, it grows 2 more heads. Oof!

Felicitously, Godzilla, thought to have met his demise in Davy Jones Locker, reappears and Noda's group decides the only option left is to have Godzilla fight Ghidorah. One monster would surely not survive the encounter but leave the victor in a bad way, vulnerable to mankind's arsenal of destruction. To do this, Murakami devises a way to use someone who was left with some Godzilla DNA in her body to act as a lure, essentially, and lead the newly-reconstituted lizard to Ghidorah for a death match.

The woman who got that DNA in the previous movie, Godzilla Minus One, is the lovely Noriko Ōishi who has married the pilot from that same movie, Kōichi Shikishima. Shikishima flies the plane with Noriko connected to Murakami's vacuum tube-laden gizmo which broadcasts her Godzilla essence and lures the creature to Ginza, Tokyo which got destroyed in the last movie. There Ghidorah is hanging out he having been lured to the site by some Van der Graaf generator thingies and the promise of their tasty megavolts. Or was is the amps?

Monsters fight, humanity is in grave peril, and people sacrifice themselves to save mankind. And the monsters fight even more!

Watching the spikes on Godzilla's tail and back start glowing blue got me all excited. My heartbeat quickened in anticipation of stuff blowing up and a grievous blow being dealt to Ghidorah. Fun!

My friend and I caught it on a Marcus Ultrascreen and not an IMAX so we saw a widescreen version of the movie projected onto a really big screen that had the same aspect ratio as your normal, average screen. Or that's how I make it out. I'd love to see this on IMAX as the monsters are framed to emphasize their height and make them all the more imposing.

Godzilla Minus Zero was an absolute blast and must be seen on a big screen - IMAX, preferably - at all costs.

OK, onto the trailers! Marcus shows many fewer than AMC but they also crank the volume way up for them.

Coming soon, 12 August 2026

Seen at AMC Fitchburg before a screening of Sheep in the Box.

I enjoyed Sheep in the Box but felt it held back, for lack of a better way of saying it. The premise is that a couple whose son died order a life-like robotic of him to assuage their grief. I expected more conflict/discussion between the husband, Kensuke, and wife, Otone, to go deeper into their relationship as well as the question of what it means to be human.

There's fairly little discussion about how well the android fills the space left by the death of their son, Kakeru, and I struggle to recall exactly how this is treated non-verbally. If memory serves, Otone's sister verbalizes something that gets tossed around a bit: that this new simulacrum is just as good as the real thing if Otone and Kensuke think it is. This stands in sharp contrast to Otone's mother who leaves a note on the refrigerator saying she wants a real grandson.

The more I think about it, the more scenes I recall that deal with the human vs. simulacrum tension. But it feels like they were put together with bailing twine and duct tape, that they don't hold together quite right.

I did really like the gang of other androids along with the odd human being that Kakeru falls in with and, eventually, leaves his "family" for. It vaguely reminded me of the android police station in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Trees are a motif here. Otone's mother urges her to deracinate a tree that is associated with her dead son. Because she is an architect, Otone builds models and she includes trees with them. In the movie, she is designing a house for a couple that is to be perched upon a small hill in the middle of town. She tries to sell the design to the couple by noting how the house would be surrounded by trees. Furthermore, Otone buys a tree for Kakeru and we see them plant it in a spot chosen by the android. And, in the end, the motley, disheveled group that Kakeru falls in with leave the town and move out into the woods.

This last act shows a couple things. First it displays a desire on the part of androids to seclude themselves away from humans and their society. But I think it also demonstrates that Kakeru has learned from Otone. We know of Otone's fondness for trees already. Now, when Kakeru first encounters the group of misfits, they live in the basement of a disused church. Their leader tasks Kakeru with finding a new place for them to live and, as he eventually see, he chooses the woods, he chooses a place filled with trees. Being pro-tree, I appreciated this greatly.

Alright, onto trailers.

Man, there were a lot of them. Lots of anime and animated features, generally.

Tree!

Gojira!!

Now, this one is a part of UW Cinematheque's fall season and I would be surprised if this one actually screens at AMC. Maybe I'm just jaded because a friend saw the trailer for The Samurai and the Prisoner there and there's no sign that it will never grace their screens.