‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ review: A roaring good sequel to ‘Minus One’

Movie review

No self-respecting “Godzilla” movie is actually about Godzilla. The 1954 original used the atomic beastie as a devastating allegory for nuclear destruction, tapping into Japan’s then-fresh trauma after America’s attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus One,” released in 2023, tested the allegory’s pliability by making Godzilla a squamous stand-in for survivor’s guilt, a gamble that made the film a critical darling and a staggering box-office success. In other words, a follow-up was guaranteed. That sequel is “Godzilla Minus Zero,” which, while not as tight or elegant as its predecessor, proves just as thematically rich and provocative.

Where “Minus One” urged us to choose life, “Minus Zero” implores us to break cycles, to zoom out and examine how the engines of war run even during peacetime. It’s a potent message, one that “Minus Zero” writer-director Yamazaki occasionally fumbles as he juggles dialed-up stakes, new characters and a story that proves too big for one film.

Two years after feeding Godzilla a “fatal” helping of exploding plane, Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki, in tiptop form) lives in relative peace with his wife, Noriko (the always-brilliant Minami Hamabe), and their adopted daughter, Akiko. Their quiet is shattered when a new monster, one every bit as deadly and mystifying as Godzilla, emerges, wreaking the kind of havoc that prompts Dr. Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka, eating everybody’s lunch) to form an anti-kaiju task force. As this kaiju unleashes exquisite hell on a still-reeling Japan, a regenerated Godzilla stomps onto the scene, triggering a chain of events that can only mean more devastation.

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“Godzilla Minus Zero” shares with its predecessor the understanding that for its message to find any kind of purchase in our hearts, the monsters must inspire raw, palpable terror. Well, consider that message received. Godzilla and this second kaiju immediately prove so scary, so merciless and indiscriminate with their various means of destruction, that Yamazaki could have taken this story in a dozen different directions and that fear would still be present in every one of them. Bolstering this fear factor is Naoki Satō’s tremendous score, which renders every action sequence overwhelmingly thrilling.

Yamazaki has said that he wrote and directed “Godzilla Minus Zero” as a response to Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” a fact that becomes more salient as the film progresses. Among the new characters is Hiroshima survivor Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka, haunting the hell out of us), whose grief at losing his family to the atomic bomb fuels Yamazaki’s ruminations on and conclusions about the war and imbues the proceedings with a crushingly well-placed sense of loss. This inner fire makes war inevitable and peace little more than an insidious intermission. The cycle cannot end if hate still burns.

This insistence on stopping awful cycles pervades every moment of the film, even the ones where its relevance isn’t straightforward. One scene shows the Shikishimas dropping Akiko off at a war orphan shelter, promising her they’ll be back. Soon after, Akiko’s peers at the shelter bombard her with various spins on the “They’re never coming back” gut punch, to which the little girl replies that her parents are different. She’s right, too. Noriko and Kōichi do return for Akiko, and the three of them resolve to face whatever comes next together.

If all of that seems like a lot to cram into one film, it’s because it is. “Godzilla Minus Zero” is busy, and it suffers most when delivering exposition it clearly doesn’t care about. There’s so much Yamazaki needs to explain, and while he does an admirable job doing so, he sometimes sacrifices momentum.

That’s a minor gripe, though. “Godzilla Minus Zero” remains a roaring good time at the movies, and if audiences respond to it the way they did its predecessor, we’ll be seeing another sequel soon.

‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ ★★★½ (out of four)
With Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Min Tanaka, Hidetaka Yoshioka. Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki. 135 minutes. In Japanese and English, with subtitles. Rated R for some violent content/bloody images. Opens Nov. 5 at multiple theaters.