Godzilla Minus Zero Live Action Movie Review

How do you bridge the gap between Godzilla as a force of terror and as a cool guy who fights other monsters? The American 2014 film tried to split the difference between metaphorical horror and “let them fight” fun before turning completely silly in its sequels. The last two JapaneseGodzilla films (Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One) were stand-alone reboots that stripped the King of the Monsters down to his scary roots without another kaiju in sight. Then Minus One became an Oscar-winning global blockbuster, and writer/director/VFX genius Takashi Yamazaki pretty much had to make a sequel — and that means scaling up with another kaiju. How do you deliver the beatdowns fans want while still maintaining consistency with the dark historical drama of Minus One?

Godzilla Minus Zero's answer is to make its monster vs. monster fight the scariest you've ever seen. As everyone's correctly guessed by now, King Ghidorah is the big new threat attacking Japan in 1949. Ghidorah's a different beast in each Godzilla continuity, so I won't say much about his portrayal here to avoid spoilers, but I'll say this: we see a lot more of him this time around than we do Go dzilla, and he looks fantastic; Yamazaki's special effects have leveled up beyond his already striking accomplishments in the first one. I'll also note something from the press conference that followed the screening: when one critic offered his interpretation of what Ghidorah might be a metaphor for, Yamazaki said he welcomed all interpretations so long as he made the viewer feel a sense of powerlessness. Well, Yamazaki-san, you did your job.

The film's surprising R rating is earned — though the violence is not excessively graphic, it refuses to sugarcoat the brutality inflicted on civilians in war. One of the new major characters, scientist Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka), is a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing; we see flashbacks of him discovering his family's burned bodies and even more PTSD-driven dark thoughts entering his head. Another flashback to the aftermath of Godzilla's Ginza rampage in Minus One, answering the question of how Noriko (Minami Hamabe) managed to survive that attack in the first place, plays similarly to the Hiroshima scenes. You couldn't edit this material down to a PG-13, and you wouldn't want to. This very concern with the consequences of violence, however, might actually make it good for teenagers to see, a moral antidote to the wanton destruction of so many bloodless blockbusters.

If Godzilla Minus Zero has one big weakness in comparison to its predecessor, it's that it's so structurally tied into said predecessor that it won't work nearly as well as its own story. The sequel has some good character development and powerful emotional moments, but it also doesn't have an arc with the same easy hook as Koichi Shikishima (Ryūnosuke Kamiki) overcoming his kamikaze survivor's guilt in Minus One. Beyond the spectacular kaiju attacks and the visceral war-horror elements, one's attachment to the human characters here is more dependent on the attachments already established in the last movie, along with the general historical context that informs its depiction of post-war Japan.

While having fun with pulpier sci-fi plot elements and the inherent excitement that comes with Godzilla (that classic Godzilla theme still hypes one up), Minus Zero ends up being a darker movie than Minus One. Its mission is less one of heroic redemption and more entangled with complications. If Minus One was Star Wars, Minus Zero is The Empire Strikes Back. I don't know if there will be a Return of the Jedi or if we're left with a beautifully bleak duology. Of course I want to see more, but if Yamazaki wishes to end it here, he's still left this series on a strong note. You can't trust that the world will remain saved, but maybe you can still protect yourself and your family.