Godzilla Minus Zero: a thrilling mega-monster romp

From the dawn of his atomic mythology in the mid-1950s, when Godzilla’s massive proportions were evoked by a man in a rubber-and-latex suit stomping through a dinky miniature cityscape, the mightiness of the King of the Monsters has always been more a trick of scale than size. He’s big, to be sure, but like radiation, the A-bomb or war itself, it’s a bigness only really felt relative to the human-sized crises it provokes. Writer, director and Oscar-winning visual effects designer Yamazaki Takashi showed he thoroughly understood that assignment with 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, creating a mega-monster romp lush with period detail and loaded with personal stakes. And he returns to deliver the same-but-more for the sequel, Godzilla Minus Zero, leaning so hard into intimate family melodrama and individual ethical conundrums that for much of the (slightly overlong) run-time one quite forgets the name on the marquee. And therefore one gets to be amazed anew when, fin by radioactive fin, the main attraction finally does show up.

The spectacle is sparing, but we get an early sampler when the opening airdrops us, mid-destruction, into 1949, two years after the events of the previous film. Infernally unlucky Japan has only just seen off one kaiju when another suddenly descends from the skies. Ghidorah, a massive, bat-winged dragon-monster, is menacing Matsumoto – the director’s home city, speaking of personal stakes. As a boy, Yamazaki was reportedly so disappointed to see the place figure only briefly in 1964’s Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster that he has returned 60 years later to properly lay it to waste. For all their superb craftsmanship and allegorical resonances with nuclear power, environmental collapse and governmental/institutional corruption, Yamazaki’s movies remain appealingly animated by the spirit of a schoolboy smashing his toy dinosaurs together.

In the face of this new threat, a task force is assembled from the motley crew that previously bested Godzilla. Dr Noda (Yoshioka Hidetaka), the Einstein-coded brains behind that operation, first recruits pilot Shikishima Koichi (Kamiki Ryunosuke), though the ace flier is reluctant to sign up. He is now married to Noriko (Hamabe Minami), whose prior encounter with Godzilla left her significantly scarred, and she urges him to consider his duty to Akiko (Nagatani Sae), the precocious six-year-old they are raising as their daughter. This instalment’s most moving dramatic innovation tracks how Akiko has shifted the post-war meaning of heroism for the Shikishimas from “being willing to die for” to “needing to stay alive for”.

Still, the couple are eventually persuaded into the effort to defeat Ghidorah, joining Matsumoto survivor Dr Murakami (Tanaka Min), a weapons specialist with a tortured, vengeful backstory, and Dr Aoyama (Nagasawa Masami), a gifted meteorologist anxious to prove herself. But Shikishima’s trick-flying (in thrilling aerial dogfights), Noda’s planning and fretting, Murakami’s devious scheming and Aoyama’s scuttling around desks trailing reams of weather charts ultimately come to nought against Ghidorah. So imagine the team’s further dismay when they hear rumblings (literal ones, in the booming sound design and soaring, swooping score from Sato Naoki) of Godzilla’s return. Calamities, as we have all come to understand, do not queue up in single file and wait politely to happen one by one, so maybe the best idea is to pit one against the other – a plan that will ultimately lead to the film’s showstopper face-off, which will take place amid the rubble of the previous film’s most carnage-laden scene.

The characters are thin archetypes but there are so many of them, each with their own sketched-in desires and destinies, that the pace doesn’t entirely flag even when the intervals between monster fights get longer. And in terms of political texture, Godzilla Minus Zero admirably does not pander to some revisionist ideal of international co-operation. There’s a surprising, period-accurate bitterness in the portrayal of the US military here (decide for yourself whether this film world-premiering at the New York Film Festival represents a betrayal of or a sly victory for the Godzilla mythos’s now firmly re-established Japanese heritage). But more importantly, Minus Zero solidly performs the primary function of every franchise sequel, in opening up the kaijuniverse to untold monsters – and therefore sequels – to come. It’s no small thing to say that under the loving stewardship of Yamazaki, the series is welcome to continue, provided it can rise to perhaps its greatest challenge: deciding whether to use positive integers next time out or to contend with the nerdy maths of Godzilla Minus (Minus One).

► Godzilla Minus Zero is in UK cinemas 6 November.