After 72 years, Godzilla has never been mightier, rampaging across screens in both America (in the MonsterVerse series that pairs him with King Kong) and in his native Japan, where Toho—the studio that developed him and is responsible for 33 of his cinematic features—has had tremendous success of late with 2016’s Shin Godzilla and 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Thus, it’s no surprise that the follow-up to that triumph, Godzilla Minus Zero, arrives with intense anticipation, as evidenced by its Sept. 26 world premiere at the New York Film Festival. Alas, with great expectations sometimes come considerable letdowns, and that’s certainly the case with Takashi Yamazaki’s sequel.
A continuation of its predecessor that pits its title beast against its most iconic foe, the film makes the classic mistake of prioritizing its ho-hum human players over its main attraction, such that those hoping for more than a fleeting glimpse of Godzilla will have to wait, and wait, and wait for the real-deal goods. At its finest, it roars with thunderous majesty—but that, regrettably, is far too rare for a wannabe-epic monster mash.
Two years after ex-kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) fatally blew up the radioactive green giant, he and his wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe) are living a happy and quiet life with their daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani). Given how many children are orphans in war-ravaged 1949 Japan, Kōichi and Noriko have to caution Akiko about expressing her joy at seeing her mom and dad. All jubilation, however, is trampled underfoot (quite literally) by a mighty winged dragon that seems to have plummeted to Earth from space and emerged from a chrysalis with the ability to absorb anything it consumes.
The carnage wrought by this fiend serves as Godzilla Minus Zero’s gangbusters opener, and as he did with his prior outing, Yamazaki enhances his action’s terror by assuming the ground-level perspectives of men and women unlucky enough to be in a kaiju’s path.
Unlike Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the director delivers thrilling you-are-there POVs of his mayhem, and Naoki Sato’s blaringly ominous score and sound design built to make the priciest Dolby speakers shake help enhance his centerpieces’ concussion force. In terms of pure aesthetic power, the film is as deliriously deafening as any in franchise history.
Unfortunately, skyscraper-grade skirmishes are few and far between in Godzilla Minus Zero, whose primary focus is its heroes’ attempts to grapple with this new threat. Having survived the creature’s initial attack, Professor Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka) dubs the dragon Ghidorah—the prefix “King” is added later by a radio broadcaster—and teams up with Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) and his Disaster Response Bureau.
Also joining the unit is Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), a weather expert whose role in finding storm-related solutions lends the proceedings a distinct Pressure-style flavor. Together, they strive to deduce a way to neutralize Ghidorah while he’s dormant, and despite their U.S. partners providing them with a massive bomb, none of them (especially the war-scarred Murakami) trust the Americans. Consequently, they develop a Plan B just in case things go sideways.
As did its immediate ancestor, Godzilla Minus Zero leans into anti-Americanism in ways that are silly and half-hearted, although its have-it-both-ways politics are still more balanced than the material’s mix of drama and chaos. Kōichi’s reluctance to get back into the fight is driven by his commitment to his family, and his eventual participation is complicated by Noriko’s own (unique) contribution to the cause. Yamazaki’s portrait of their individual and shared plights is earnest and frequently funny, as is his depiction of his other players. The issue, however, is that he’s so fixated on his protagonists’ struggles that he loses sight of Godzilla to the eventual detriment of the saga’s adrenalized dynamism.
While an aerial dogfight between Ghidorah and Kōichi is fierce—and offers a high-flying counterpoint to Godzilla Minus One’s aquatic-centric bedlam—Godzilla himself is more or less MIA from this venture until its conclusion. Except for a brief flashback glimpse (in which he’s in the distance) and his thirty-second official entrance, the atomic goliath is nowhere to be seen before the 75-minute mark, and he only legitimately struts his stuff in the film’s final half hour. Worse, his inevitable battle with Ghidorah is shockingly underwhelming, due to both its brevity and choreography that lacks imagination or intricacy—a few bites, a couple of energy blasts, and the entire thing is over before it’s begun.
The visual effects employed by Yamazaki remain top-notch; Godzilla is a fearsome hulk with gigantic thighs and furious eyes, and Ghidorah is a shrieking behemoth with a few regenerative tricks of his own. Yet over the course of 135 minutes, Godzilla Minus Zero spends as little time on them as is possible, opting instead to concentrate on Kōichi and company’s post-WWII guilt, regret, fury, trauma, and madness.
Those concerns are certainly relevant to the underlying themes that have always buttressed Godzilla tales. But there’s a limit to how much they should dominate such a blockbuster, and in this instance, the writer/director strains so hard to wring pathos from his semi-cartoony characters’ hang-ups that he winds up giving short shrift to the anarchic destruction his premise demands.
A quick bit in which Godzilla meets Lady Liberty and introduces himself to New Yorkers proves a glimpse of the film Godzilla Minus Zero might have been had it not been unduly distracted by secondary matters. Putting Godzilla on the back burner of his own sagas is not an uncommon occurrence—see (or, rather, don’t) Apple TV’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters as a prime example of this phenomenon.
Nonetheless, it’s a particularly deflating development in light of Toho’s last few triumphs, and it’s compounded by the fact that even a lame stateside effort, 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, crafted a superior Godzilla-Ghidorah rumble.
Considering that Godzilla Minus Zero concludes on an open-ended note, it’s not inconceivable that Yamazaki will rebound with a threequel that gets back to bruising, blistering business. In the meantime, though, die-hards will have to content themselves with the knowledge that, should they crave truly peak Godzilla madness, they can always revisit its precursor.
