By John Corrado
When Japanese director Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One was released in 2023, it became a surprise breakout hit. It even took home the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, a huge testament to what Yamazaki – also serving as visual effects supervisor – and his team were able to pull off on a limited budget.
The film was notable for rebooting the Godzilla franchise in its native Japan (outside the more recent American Monsterverse movies pitting Godzilla against King Kong), serving as both a kaiju epic and a sincere tribute to the cultural significance of the character within the country’s history.
This sets a high bar for Yamazaki’s follow-up, Godzilla Minus Zero, which lives up to the hype of its predecessor. It works as both sequel and companion piece to Minus One, delivering on the promise of being a post-WWII human story within a grand scale monster movie. Yamazaki has crafted one of the best blockbuster experiences of the year, balancing character drama with massive set-pieces that deserve to be seen on the biggest screen you can find.
This sequel is set in 1949, two years after the events of Minus One, with Japan as a country still very much in the process of mourning and rebuilding after the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the attack by radioactive lizard Gojira shown in the first film. When a new kaiju threat emerges, the humans are left scrambling, trying to figure out how to stop further destruction.
Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), one of the protagonists of the first film, has now been appointed director of the government’s Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, and recruits biologist Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka) to help research the creatures. The Japanese officials are also trying to navigate their relationship with the Americans, after they dropped the nuclear bomb on them in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.
Yamazaki grounds the kaiju action by developing his human characters, with the first stretch of the film largely focused on buildup and emotional drama. The cast of mostly returning characters also includes former kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who survived Godzilla’s attack in the first film, and are now trying to live a quiet life with their adopted daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani).
The ambitious narrative structure finds Yamazaki weaving in flashbacks to events that took place before and during the first movie (you could almost say this is The Godfather Part II of monster movie sequels). But what’s most impressive about Godzilla Minus Zero is how Yamazaki ties all of these moments of character-driven melodrama, and the deeper themes about a country in collective mourning, into something that also simply works as a giant, theatre-shaking monster movie.
Despite having a considerably larger budget than Minus One (which only cost around $15 million in US dollars), Yamazaki is still working on a budget below most Hollywood movies, and the film fully holds its own alongside them, if not putting some of them to shame. Like in the first movie, Godzilla Minus Zero doesn’t shy away from showing the creatures, highlighting the immense scale of them as they rampage through Japan. The creature effects here are once again quite impressive, including some surprisingly brutal moments of carnage (and severed lizard limbs).
Yamazaki also does a very good job of pacing the film across its lengthy 135 minute running time, delivering moments of giddy excitement as he builds to the thrilling sequences of kaiju action. The set-pieces are preceded by scenes of the scientists excitedly talking about how to take down these creatures, which makes it even more satisfying to see these plans get put into action.
Shot by cinematographer Kōzō Shibasaki (returning from the first movie), the set-pieces themselves are exhilarating to watch, including a midsection aerial sequence that plays like the monster movie answer to Top Gun. It was filmed for IMAX, and the action scenes offer full spectacle when seen in that format, complete with the aspect ratio expanding from 2.39:1 to 1.43:1 to fill the screen from top to bottom during these sequences. The visuals are aided by the rattling sound design and composer Naoki Satō’s musical score, which are both best experienced on a theatre sound system.
Both Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla Minus Zero have the added benefit of working as pieces of cultural reclamation, taking the franchise back to its Cold War allegory roots of the original 1954 film. These are, at heart, movies about Japan trying to rebuild after World War II, while bracing for the possibility of another attack. Yamazaki once again deftly balances all of this while also delivering plenty of foot-stomping, giant lizard thrills. This is what blockbuster filmmaking is all about.
