TEASER - 153: Godzilla Minus One (with Ben Clarkson)

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The cartoonist and co-creator of Justice Warriors, Ben Clarkson, joins the pod from Montreal to talk about Godzilla Minus One, the 33rd film in Toho Studios' venerable series which turns 70 years old next year.

As big budget Hollywood movies underperform and business models collapse, two Japanese films have been surprise hits in North America - Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron and Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, which reportedly only cost a tenth of the budget of a typical MCU film.

Our discussion casts a critical eye on Godzilla Minus One as symptomatic of larger problems in modern blockbuster filmmaking that not even this film can avoid; wasteful spending, labor conditions for VFX artists, creative accounting, and most crucially a lack of cinematic style and vision in the finished product. Ben offers a critique from the perspective of a creative as well, how camera placement and the concept of “shooting for the edit” as important storytelling techniques seem to be afterthoughts in the modern age.

We also compare Godzilla Minus One to a better recent Japanese Godzilla movie we both love, 2016’s Shin Godzilla, which works both as a kaiju film and a satire about bureaucratic Japan’s failure to handle the 2011 earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Plus Ben and I talk about Justice Warriors and his great trailer for season 4 of the Blowback podcast.

Follow Ben Clarkson on Twitter.

Get your copy of Justice Warriors by Ben Clarkson & Matt Bors now!

Trailer #2 for Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki, 2023)

Japanese trailer for Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, 2016)

Trailer for Season 4 of the Blowback podcast (Ben Clarkson, 2023)