In 2023, Godzilla Minus One, a new Japanese Godzilla movie, emerged out of nowhere and knocked everyone on their ass. Directed by Takashi Yamazaki, it used an immediate post-war setting, inventive action filmmaking, and a reverence for the material to deliver the best-received Godzilla picture in years. It was a far cry from both the often-cheap older Japanese Godzilla movies and Hollywood’s recent and much more expensive treatments of the franchise. It did so with a reported budget of $15 million.
Beating Hollywood at its own game, Godzilla Minus One won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects, in a year that also offered first-rate Mission: Impossible and John Wick films. Since the Godzilla series always has sequels, a follow-up was inevitable, and now it’s arrived, in the form of Godzilla Minus Zero. It’s fortunate that Takashi Yamazaki made the sequel right away instead of chasing Marvel bucks.
It shares many virtues with the 2023 film, including fantastic action, a first-rate score, and a plot that places it in an intriguing moment in Japanese history. It’s just a tick below the previous film, mostly because the pacing is sluggish, but overall it’s another successful outing for Godzilla.
After the first film, set during the conclusion of World War II and ending with Godzilla’s apparent death and implied rebirth, the new one is again set in the late-1940s (the “minus” is a play on the films being set earlier in the chronology than the first Godzilla movie, from 1954).
The new film’s plot follows Godzilla as he goes up against a familiar monster, the flying, three-headed, dragon-like King Ghidorah, and a complex plan by the human characters to, in the words of Ken Watanabe in Hollywood’s 2014 Godzilla movie, “let them fight.” Those elaborate creature fights likely required a higher budget than the first time around, but the style is still true to the earlier film.
The Japanese characters are all facing trauma, brought on by the war, the Hiroshima nuclear attack, run-ins with Godzilla in the first film, or, in some cases, both. Biologist Murakami (Min Tanaka) plans to use Godzilla to get revenge on the Americans. Also back are former kamikaze pilot Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who bear scars from the past, and are trying to balance the mission with protecting their young daughter. There are, again, first-rate action sequences, including a Top Gun-style aerial dogfight with one of the monsters and, later, the final kaiju battle.
There’s a lot going on, maybe too much at times, with the plot overstuffed and the running time longer than needed. Overall, this is another enjoyable Godzilla film from very talented people.