Godzilla rips off his own arm in Godzilla Minus Zero. His enemy’s teeth are sunk into it so tightly that it’s the only way out.
That’s the kind of movie this is. The sequel to Godzilla Minus One wins every fight it picks against another monster. The one it loses is the fight to make you care about the people underneath.
Godzilla Minus Zero opens in theaters in Japan on November 3 and in North America on November 6. This review is based on a screening timed to the New York Film Festival.
The sequel problem nobody has solved
Godzilla movies have carried the same curse for decades. You make a serious origin story, with real thematic weight, and then you have to follow it up. The sequel has to go bigger on spectacle while somehow keeping the soul intact. And the best of the genre has always had something to say about the world we live in, which gets harder when skyscraper-sized lizards are slugging it out MMA-style.
Minus Zero is on the ropes before the opening bell. Three years ago, Minus One dealt with survivor’s guilt, hope in the face of hopelessness and found family, among other things. Returning writer-director Takashi Yamazaki now has to squeeze more out of characters who’ve already been to hell and back while also blowin’ up stuff real good.
He can’t do both. The explosions win.
Two years later, and two monsters now
The story picks up two years after Minus One. Ryunosuke Kamiki is back as Kōichi Shikishima, the former would-be kamikaze pilot from World War II who was instrumental in taking down Godzilla the first time. Minami Hamabe returns as Noriko, the woman he took in after the American air raids on Tokyo.
They’re married now. They’ve also adopted Akiko, the orphaned baby they cared for after that same disaster, and they’re living happily as a family. Which, in a Godzilla movie, means the clock is ticking.
Only this time there are two threats. Godzilla is back, obviously. But the film opens on someone else entirely.
The first sequence is pure devastation. A new creature tears through the city as civilians flee in the streets, dodging rubble from collapsing buildings and lightning breath from the monster’s mouth. Fans already guessed it, and the marketing has teased it: this is Ghidorah, known as King Ghidorah in the larger Toho mythology and generally the big guy’s archnemesis. (Ghidorah has also been called “Monster Zero,” which explains the title.)
The effects are still the best in the business
Yamazaki and his visual effects team, who won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects on the last one, pull off the same trick again. These creatures never feel like CGI monstrosities. They feel like real ones: humongous, slow-moving, reptilian and scarier for all of it.
Ghidorah gets his own personality, too. His movements are scary but herky-jerky, almost cat-like, which sets him apart from his counterpart the second he shows up.
So the VFX credentials are established within minutes, to nobody’s surprise. So is something else. A Godzilla Part 2 inevitably means more monsters, and more monsters come with a cost.
There’s nothing wrong with monster-on-monster action. Everyone loves it. But the more a monster movie turns into a mash, whether it’s Toho or Universal or Alien, the more the human characters and their emotional baggage start looking puny next to these god-like creatures.
A hill of beans
In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart said, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Yes, that’s a Bogart quote in a Godzilla review. It’s also the whole issue with Minus Zero.
Kōichi, Noriko and little Akiko just pale against the scale of what Godzilla and company can destroy. The first film framed all that destruction through the trio’s trauma, from the monster and from what they lived through in the war. That resonance is missing here.
Noriko does get a bigger role. Minus One ended with her miraculously surviving a Godzilla attack but carrying a mysterious scar on her neck. It’s no shock to learn it was never just a scar, and that she’s now an important player in the fight against the monsters.
But she and Kōichi are both pawns in a larger game playing out on the world stage. Regular people on the ground carry the trauma of every battle, and the powers that be don’t seem to care. If the movie has a central theme, it’s that we can’t outrun our own mistakes as a species, and we’ll keep making them over and over, no matter how hard the best among us try.
The best character gets the least to do
The most interesting person in Minus Zero may also be the most underserved. Min Tanaka plays Kanji Murakami, a scientist whose work is key to battling the monsters this time.
He’s also kind of warped. Tanaka gets one scene in particular that’s too spoilery to describe here, and it’s a highlight of the film. Like Kōichi, Noriko and every other character in the movie, Murakami had his life irrevocably changed by the war, and he’s still struggling with that while trying to stop a pair of living A-bombs from doing more damage to humankind.
Then there’s the Statue of Liberty. The much ballyhooed sequence involving Godzilla and Lady Liberty, first glimpsed in the trailer last spring, is certainly something to behold.
Toho has asked critics not to reveal the specifics. What can be said: it’s everything you’ve imagined and theorized about, and also none of that at all. It ties back to Murakami at one of his darkest moments, which makes it one of the most memorable Godzilla-on-human scenes in the film.
And that’s where the nagging feeling comes back. Godzilla stomps through what looks like Spider-Noir’s version of New York City, and the emotional weight of the whole scene rests on Murakami. But his true motivations, and how they’re resolved, play like an afterthought instead of the movie’s thematic or emotional core. The film suffers for it.
When it’s time to brawl, it brawls
By the final act, you know exactly where this is headed. That’s fine. Monsters must brawl.
Once again, the period setting adds real luster to the effects and action. Watching Kōichi back in the pilot seat, this time flying 1949-era fighter planes, is thrilling.
Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) is back too, now head of the “Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau.” His schemes to slow down and eventually stop Godzilla and his enemy are often ingenious and satisfyingly crunchy.
On the kaiju front, Minus Zero gives you everything you came for, and that’s before the final showdown between Godzilla and his archnemesis. The people from Minus One, though, have somehow turned mostly two-dimensional between films. The last movie was about what survivors carry. This one is mostly about how much a monster can carry, and the answer is a lot, right up until it tears off its own arm to get free.
