Matthew Tobin

This is easily the best movie I’ve seen all year! It’s amazing how Toho was able to pull off such stunning effects on a mere $15 million budget! I’ve seen a lot of people saying it puts a lot of Hollywood productions with budgets upwards of $100 million to shame, and I would have to agree with that sentiment. Don’t go into this expecting something like a Marvel movie, Fast and Furious, or even a Monsterverse film; all the negative reviews I’ve seen are coming from people who are either confused about this not being part of the Legendary Godzilla films, or they simply don’t seem to understand that this is not supposed to be like a Hollywood action film. This movie is a lot more like a war drama, and a very good one at that. It feels as if you took the original Gojira from 1954, and tossed in elements of other movies like Jaws and Dunkirk. Godzilla is genuinely menacing in this film. Even when he isn’t on screen, his presence is ever looming. They do an excellent job building suspense for Godzilla himself, in a way that is very reminiscent of the shark in Jaws. Something that Godzilla movies always seem to fall flat on is the human characters, but I am very happy to say that Minus One knocked it out of the park in this department. In other Godzilla films, the human characters typically come off bland and their scenes feel like a chore to get through just so I can see more kaiju action, but this film’s characters are very well written and I find myself genuinely caring about them. Although I said this movie isn’t like a Hollywood action film, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t captivated by the whole movie, because I absolutely was! This is a movie that needs to be seen on the biggest screen possible! Even if you don’t like reading subtitles in movies (the dialogue is entirely in Japanese), try to get over that because this is not a movie you want to miss out on! Godzilla Minus One and Oppenheimer are the top two movies I’ve seen this year, and Minus One isn’t number two. It’s that good.

To anyone complaining about bad language among other aspects of the movie being inappropriate, what did you expect from an R-rated movie? The same thing happened with the movie Sausage Party: naive parents see a trailer featuring animated characters or cute dogs and automatically assume it must be a movie for children, despite it being stated in the trailer and shown on movie posters that the movie is rated R. If you took your kid to see this movie and are now upset about your kids being exposed to “bad language” or “inappropriate behavior”, you have absolutely nobody to blame but yourself; Stop looking to blame a movie that was not meant for your kids, you took them to see the movie so it’s entirely your fault. Aside from all that nonsense, Strays was just alright. It wasn’t nearly as funny as I was expecting it to be, but it still got a few chuckles out of me.