Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Godzilla Minus Zero:
The Host
Bong Joon-ho’s The Host is the best creature feature to come out of Asia since the original Godzilla, and it shares Takashi Yamazaki’s instinct to keep the camera on ordinary people. After toxic chemicals are dumped into Seoul’s Han River, a mutated beast emerges and snatches a young girl, sending her scrappy, dysfunctional family (led by Song Kang-ho) on a desperate rescue mission.
Train to Busan
Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan traps a workaholic father (Gong Yoo) and his young daughter on a high-speed train as a zombie outbreak tears across South Korea. It’s a relentless disaster movie with a huge heart, and like the Minus films, it measures its spectacle by what its characters are willing to sacrifice for one another.
Signs
M. Night Shyamalan’s best movie watches a global invasion unfold from a single Pennsylvania farmhouse. Mel Gibson plays a former priest who lost his faith after his wife’s death, and Joaquin Phoenix co-stars as his brother. Much of the dread comes from news reports and half-glimpsed shapes, and like the Minus films, it’s really a story about grief and a broken family finding its way back together.
Nope
Jordan Peele’s Nope is a monster movie about looking up. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer play siblings running a struggling Hollywood horse ranch who discover that something is hiding in the clouds above their valley. Peele stages his creature with the patience and sense of scale of a classic kaiju film, and the IMAX-shot imagery is some of the most striking in modern blockbuster filmmaking.
Jurassic World Rebirth
Our review wasn’t kind to Jurassic World Rebirth, but Gareth Edwards, who directed the 2014 American Godzilla, still knows how to frame a giant creature for awe. Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey lead a covert team sent to collect DNA from the largest dinosaurs left on Earth, and the creature set pieces are worth the price of admission.
Oppenheimer
Godzilla has always been a metaphor for the atomic bomb, and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer tells the other side of that story. Cillian Murphy plays J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory and spent the rest of his life haunted by what it unleashed. It’s the perfect companion piece to a franchise born from the fallout of that same weapon.
The Boy and the Heron
Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning The Boy and the Heron begins in wartime Japan, as young Mahito loses his mother in a Tokyo hospital fire and is sent to the countryside. What follows is a strange, beautiful fantasy, but the film is grounded in the same wartime grief and guilt that drive Yamazaki’s films, making it an essential pairing with Godzilla Minus Zero.
All Quiet on the Western Front
Edward Berger’s Oscar-winning adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel follows a young German soldier (Felix Kammerer) from patriotic enlistment to the mud and slaughter of the Western Front. There are no monsters here beyond the war itself, but the film’s portrait of soldiers sacrificed by the people in charge echoes the survivor’s guilt at the heart of the Minus films.
28 Days Later
Danny Boyle’s lo-fi apocalypse opens with Cillian Murphy waking from a coma in an empty London hospital, weeks after a rage-inducing virus has torn through Britain. Like Yamazaki’s postwar Tokyo, it’s a portrait of a country picking through the ruins after catastrophe, and of survivors trying to decide what kind of society is worth rebuilding.
Mickey 17
Bong Joon-ho returns with a sci-fi satire starring Robert Pattinson as an “expendable,” a colonist who is printed out again every time he dies on a dangerous mission to an icy alien world. Mark Ruffalo plays the pompous leader of the expedition, and the planet’s native creatures prove far more sympathetic than the humans, a reversal that monster-movie fans will appreciate.
READ MORE: Movies Like Godzilla Minus One, The 20 Best Creature Features of All Time
