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, 13 September 2026

Seen before a screening of Hope at Marcus Point.

I found Hope to be a lot of fun and enjoyed how it confounded my expectations.

It begins with a fairly lengthy introduction in which a group of Korean rednecks who were going out hunting find a mauled cow in the middle of the road near the Korean Demilitarized Zone which, we are warned, has many minefields. The cousin of one of them, Ko Sung-ki, happens to be the chief of police of Hope Harbor and he is brought in to examine the bovine tragedy. Everyone reckons the incident to be strange since the animal wasn't eaten at all, just clawed to death.

 

The rednecks, er, hunters, head to the farm where the cow is from while the chief constable, Ko Bum-seok, goes back to town only to find a monster ravaging the town and slaughtering the population. He joins with others who have taken up arms but even their high powered rifles are powerless against the creature. Just when things look bad in a terminal way, another police officer, the lovely Im Sung-ae, appears with a grenade launcher that helps matters. For my part, I had those mines in mind and figured the beast would stray into a minefield and meet its end. But no. Instead it is hit by a large tanker truck and killed. This was a long scene and director Na Hong-jin did the right thing by not showing us the creature until he needed to. It was pure kinetic fun with Bum-seok being frustrated at every turn yet surviving his encounters with the creature. Oh, the lady officer's frustrated cussin' was funny.

 

It was also noteworthy that the editor let the scene in town play out before cutting to the hunters arriving at the farm and finding it having been laid waste. They eventually discover a spaceship in the woods and we come to understand that the creature was an alien. This is reinforced by a grotesque, but funny, scene in which a scientist resorts to a chainsaw to autopsy the dead creature that ran roughshod in Hope Harbor. Our peace officer heroes encounter another hunter, Yang-bae, who claims to have killed one of the aliens. Upon further examination, it was an immature alien that he killed which leads Bum-seok to conclude that this was the child of the alien that had killed so many in town - it was out looking for its child.

 

Our fellow humans converge on the woods where they encounter more aliens who are also impervious to bullets. Out of nowhere a new group of hunters appear on horseback. They seemed to know about the aliens and to be out for some extraterrestrial blood sport. Huh? The aliens kill everyone save our ragtag group of police officers and friends.

 

There's another long scene in which one of the aliens chases someone on horseback as the other survivors race away next to him in a police car. Sung-ae launches more grenades as Bum-seok attempts to get the man on the horse to jump from his equestrian perch onto the car.

 

If the appearance of those hunters on horseback was surprising, then the sight of an enormous spaceship emerging from the clouds all aflame and crashing into a mountain was downright astonishing. The aliens recognize it and the movie ends with them having a confab on their next moves.

 

For me, Hope was just a blast. Laced with plenty of thrills, chills, and spills, I appreciated that scenes were allowed to play out without constant intercutting to allow us to keep tabs on characters in a wholly different location. Seeing from the get-go that these aliens, the mature ones, that is, are impervious to bullets had me wondering if humanity would come up with a clever solution or if all hope was lost, so to speak. Sung-ae had some funny dialogue while the motley group of characters were all distinctive and had me rooting for them until the very end. The stuff that came out of left field may have left me pondering things but they never detracted from the fun.

 

I am glad to see that it remains in theaters here in Madison.

 

Trailers:

 

 

 

 

Finally something I'd go see.

 

 

While this is playing next month at Cinematheque, I will be at Gamehole Con when it screens. So I hope that it actually plays at a Marcus theater instead of being tantalized by a trailer only for the film to never hit a commercial screen in Madison.