Category: Science-fiction creature drama
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This is how you make a movie!
It's so refreshing to see a movie that has high production values, great effects, good pacing, a plot you can follow, but also doesn't try to shove "the message" down your throat. After all the big-budget Hollywood releases over the last few years that seemed to have been made with a minority audience in mind and turned out to be lousy - be it Madame Web, Star Wars: The Acolyte, The Marvels, or numerous others - it was seriously refreshing to see a movie that shows us it's not that hard to just tell a good story.
And the reason I start my review off with on this line of thought is because it was one of the things that came to mind about 15-20 minutes in - "I'm not being preached to!" - to the point that one can't help but wonder if Hollywood, the birthplace of modern cinema, is now complicit in its death. The COVID pandemic shut productions and audiences to a halt, and we also had the writer's strike, but even with all that in mind, I personally can't help but feel that most big-budget modern Hollywood productions made nowadays are written primarily to avoid allegations of being some type of -ist (racist, sexist, misogynist, white supremacist, et al), and storytelling comes a distant second.
This is NOT how things should be. Audiences should be embraced, particularly when there are hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. The reason that movies are big business is because we love good stories being told - be it in movie form, book form, comic form, or even sitting around the campfire. We want to feel the highs and the lows and the thrills, and the best stories are ones that are told with passion and authenticity and intelligence.
So congratulations to director Takashi Yamasaki - Godzilla: Minus One has relatable characters in a relatable scenario (monsters and nuclear blasts aside).