It’s a good time to love Godzilla. There’s a new movie coming from Legendary next year, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire; there’s Apple’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which may or may not arrive this November; and there’s Toho’s upcoming Godzilla Minus One, which lands in theaters in December—and for which there’s a new trailer full of devastation and dread.
Godzilla Minus One takes the big lizard back to the 1940s, when he appears in postwar Japan, which is already in a catastrophic state—hence the “minus one” part of the title. Text in the trailer explains, “Postwar, Japan had lost everything. … From ‘zero’ to ‘minus.’”
Having Godzilla rampaging across your country does seem to put things in an even worse situation. There’s also some sort of government cover-up, a lot of death, a nuclear explosion, and the alarming utterance, “That monster … will never forgive us.” What exactly humanity has done to piss him off (this time) is yet to be confirmed.
Toho’s Godzilla is entirely unrelated to the various Godzilla tales produced in the U.S. by Legendary, so they’re free to do whatever they like with the monster mythos without being trapped by franchise canon. The last Toho Godzilla movie, Shin Godzilla, was very, very different from this new film.
Godzilla Minus One is written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki. It’s in theaters on December 1st.
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