Godzilla Is Now Judged in New York Before He Gets Home

The Japanese title is the monster's name followed by a minus sign, a zero, a decimal point and another zero. It reads less like a film than a figure on a gauge, and I wrote it on the back of a ticket stub between shows at the mini-theatre on Saturday, because it was the only part of Godzilla Minus Zero anybody in Tokyo could hold that night. The film itself was in New York.

It had its world premiere there on the 26th, local time, in the Spotlight Gala section of the 64th New York Film Festival. Cinema Today's report from the evening gives the running order the way a Japanese trade paper always does, with the modesty of a timetable: a press conference, a red carpet, then the official screening, with Yamazaki Takashi on stage beside Kamiki Ryunosuke and Hamabe Minami. Yamazaki directed, wrote the script and handled the visual effects, and he spoke about King Ghidorah joining the film. The New York audience, the report says, was full of praise.

That is the fact of the week, and I keep turning it over. The first room ever to watch this Japanese monster film was an American one. The first verdicts on it were written in English, and by the time Tokyo woke up on Sunday they were already filed.

There is a clear reason for the route. Variety reminds us that Godzilla Minus One won Best Visual Effects at the 96th Academy Awards in 2024, the first Godzilla film to win an Oscar, and the sequel has now set its sights on a Best Picture nomination. The line Variety put in its headline is the most Japanese sentence of awards season: if the possibility is not zero, it is hard not to have a little bit of hope. Somebody on that team understands exactly how a title with a zero in it will be quoted back at them.

The reviews, when they came, were warm to the point of relief. The Guardian caught it at the festival and called it spectacular Japanese action that continues the franchise's winning streak, with smart social commentary and effects it describes as jaw-dropping. IndieWire went further and called the direct sequel one better than the last movie in almost every way, an IMAX-sized melodrama in which Godzilla squares off against King Ghidorah in some of the most thrilling kaiju fights ever filmed. The South China Morning Post found it visually stunning and full of surprises, and its critic opened with the observation that Minus One had proved there is plenty of life left in the old kaiju. Anime News Network put it in a sentence: the King of the Monsters is here to blow you away again, and this time he has company.

The review I would frame is the one that argues with itself. Slant headlined its piece fascinatingly at war with itself, and it begins with a scientist, Dr. Murakami Kanji, played by Tanaka Min, pondering how anyone stops a lightning-spitting dragon. I like a monster review that starts with a man thinking. IndieWire's word for the film was melodrama, and a melodrama with a dragon in it is always going to be asked which half wins. A critic who says the halves are fighting has at least watched both.

What struck me most was the speed of the echo. Within a day Filmweb in Warsaw was running the headline Godzilla conquered New York over a page of rapturous reactions, and CinePOP in Brazil was counting first reactions on social media that call it even better than Minus One. A Japanese film's reputation was assembled in Manhattan and exported to Poland and Brazil before Sunday evening in Tokyo.

Tokyo, meanwhile, was looking backwards, and I mean that kindly. The 39th Tokyo International Film Festival announced its cultural programme this week, and at the top of it is a thirteen-film retrospective of Mizoguchi Kenji. The same weekend brought news that Toshio Masuda has died at 98. He directed Space Battleship Yamato films and co-directed the Japanese side of Tora! Tora! Tora!, a war film that needed a Japanese crew and an American one to exist. His generation had to share the frame with Hollywood. Yamazaki's gets to walk into New York with its own monster and its own name above the title.

New York is becoming a habit. Next month CloverWorks brings its omnibus anime film Grotesqqque to its American premiere on October 8, with the director Atsushi Nishigori attending in person in the city. None of this is a complaint. A Japanese genre film that opens abroad first is a film its makers expect the world to want, and the world, on this week's evidence, does.

I have not seen it. I have the stub, the minus sign and the two zeros in my own handwriting, and a lightning-spitting dragon that for now exists only in other people's sentences. When the film comes home I will be in the last dark room in Shibuya, in a seat near the aisle, waiting for the lights to go down and the numbers to mean something.