Blockbuster films in America often have faceless, nameless enemies. Villainous, fictional countries attempt to rule the world, steal nuclear codes, or set off a bioweapon, only to be taken down by one of our aging Hollywood stars. Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus Zero, the director’s sequel to 2023’s acclaimed Godzilla Minus One, takes a different approach. Its villains range from the American military (and government) to the kaiju Ghidorah, both of which are destructive. The geopolitical underpinnings of the film work as a reminder of what war causes and continues to cause. But it’s still a Godzilla movie, and Yamazaki scales up the action to blaring, symphonic proportions.
Set two years after the first film, Godzilla Minus Zero finds Japan largely dealing with the wreckage of WWII after atomic decimation at the hands of the United States. Many of the same actors return, the disaster-response crew again facing a kaiju. The team—response director Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), biologist Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka), and pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki)—must face off with King Ghidorah, a giant, flying beast capable of ruining cities once it opens its mouth.
Yamazaki, who also wrote the film and did its visual effects, doesn’t turn away from carnage. Unlike many other blockbusters, his film looks directly at the destruction and death caused by wartime violence. Minus Zero‘s pain is visceral. The camera lingers on the injured, the dying, the dead, forcing us to understand the consequences of American actions. These characters haven’t just been through fighting Godzilla; they’ve been fighting and recovering for the past decade.
The story shifts into two threads (a family drama and a heart-racing monster thriller) after the team fully understands the kaiju they’re facing. Yamazaki decides to spend time with the Shikishima trio, following Kōichi, his wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and their daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani) in the aftermath of her interaction with Godzilla. The family becomes the core of Minus Zero, further earning emotional beats of the third act as the faces of unending violence.
But this is Godzilla and Ghidorah’s movie. It’s a kaiju film with big action—planes flying overhead, monsters in the air and on the ground. Yamazaki does an incredible job framing the scope of the action, using myriad stationed characters to show the complexity of battling these creatures. Even as the film expands, it attempts and often succeeds at retaining humanity. Yamazaki always finds time to see how these people are reacting, how they are persevering. The kaiju themselves are breathtaking, applause-inducing, and just enormous.
Yoshioka, Murakami, and Hamabe bring pathos to the monster mash: these characters grapple with the past and present alike, each bringing a unique weight to this story. Yamazaki has made a Godzilla film that encapsulates destruction and resilience staged at a massive scale and is necessary to see in a packed theater.
Godzilla Minus Zero premiered at the 64th New York Film Festival and opens on November 6.
