Review: ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ is a phenomenal Godzilla movie, but lives in the shadow of ‘Minus One’

2023’s Godzilla Minus One has a strong claim to being the best Godzilla movie ever made. The premise was simple: a full reboot of the franchise as a post-World War II period piece that zeroes in on the atomic trauma that powered the 1954 original. It was a success on every level and I won’t ever forget seeing that atomic breath scene for the first time on the big screen.

Now, inevitably, Godzilla is back for a sequel. So, is Godzilla Minus Zero as good (or even better than) Minus One? At the risk of making the rest of this review redundant… No, it’s not as good as its predecessor. But it is a top-tier Godzilla movie.

We pick up the story in 1949, two years after the events of Minus One and with Japan struggling to deal with another giant, highly destructive monster. With the (apparent) defeat of Godzilla already under their belt, the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau led by Hidetaka Yoshioka’s Kenji Noda leaps into action to bring the new beast down before it can wreak more havoc.

“My jaw was left flapping uselessly on the floor”

That draws Ryunosuke Kamiki’s Kōichi (the former kamikaze pilot hero of the first movie) and his now-wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe) back into action. From then, the plot follows a template that’ll be familiar to any long-term kaiju fan as our heroes formulate various technobabble plans to stop the monster, before inevitably concluding that the only realistic way to defeat a giant monster is with… another giant monster.

But though the skeleton of this plot is familiar, the meat on the bones is fresh. Like Minus One, the sequel contrasts the surreal sight of gigantic monsters rampaging through cities with an almost perverse fixation on realistic human trauma.

Director Takashi Yamazaki doesn’t miss an opportunity to show regular folk screaming in terror as their homes are destroyed around them, or hospitals full of groaning, semi-conscious, bandaged, bloody, dying victims. Often he’ll focus on one person in particular, like a mother clutching her screaming baby as both perish horribly. If this were just a monster movie, this stuff would be tasteless, but Yamazaki is determined to take this all incredibly seriously.

The explicit root of the suffering in Minus One and Minus Zero is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it’s hard not to look at the flattened, dusty, and shattered cityscapes of the third act of the movie and not think of recent images of what’s left of Gaza. This is the true thematic weight of the kaiju: civilian lives obliterated by unfathomable forces they’re powerless to resist. After all, any one of us could be that fleeing dot vaporized by a monster’s beam.

The only wrinkle is that this is a Godzilla sequel and, just as in every other series of direct Godzilla sequels, Big G is once again on the path away from an unknowable and terrifying force of nature into basically a giant scaly superhero. In Minus Zero, he’s still a force of nature, but I suspect by the inevitable third movie we’ll have Godzilla triumphantly rolling in to save the day like a big damn hero.

You fundamentally can’t have Godzilla be both a terrifying symbol of awe-inspiring mass destruction resulting from man’s atomic folly and a hero who rolls in to save the day before stomping back to Monster Island.

All that said, while not as thematically resonant as Minus One, Minus Zero is a phenomenal kaiju movie. The third act contains some of the most insane giant monster action I’ve ever seen, all realized through astonishing CGI that smartly emphasizes the monsters’ scale, weight, and impact on the environment. Throughout the final tussle. my jaw was left flapping uselessly on the floor as I soaked up the carnage.

Even beyond the monster action, there are sequences in this movie that go way harder than anything you’d usually expect from a giant monster movie and brush up against the edges of good taste… and then pull back before crossing into exploitation. There’s nothing as incredible as the atomic breath scene from Minus One, but specific shots from Minus Zero are burned indelibly into my brain.

Godzilla Minus Zero is a phenomenal Godzilla movie. It inevitably exists within the shadow of its predecessor, but both movies objectively represent the pinnacle of the kaiju genre. Monster movie fans… we’re eating well.