Like a certain King of the Monsters lying dormant at the bottom of the sea, it was kinda hard to see “Godzilla Minus One” coming when it hit theaters in 2023. A $10 million historical crowd-pleaser, it nonetheless landed $116 million at the box office (and an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, especially notable considering the budget). That’s no small feat for the big lizard, considering he’s spent decades, a Roland Emmerich movie, and a still-struggling MonsterVerse trying to make waves in America. Instead, Godzilla has worked best when he’s stuck to his Japanese roots—both with greater experimentations like 2016’s “Shin Godzilla” and the more populist thrills of “Minus One.”
The success of the latter meant a sequel wasn’t far behind, and “Godzilla Minus Zero” serves as a straightforward continuation of Takashi Yamazaki’s classical histrionics. This branch of the Zillaverse is far from deconstructionist: It’s straight-down-the-middle, no-nonsense monster/war movies that use the postwar Japanese period to play on traditional war-movie tropes under the auspices of its apocalyptic monster battles. “Minus Zero” doesn’t quite reach the miraculous highs of its predecessor, but the old boy still has plenty of bite.
It’s been two-plus years since former kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), with the help of former weapons designer Dr. Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) and the might of the Japanese military, sent Godzilla to a watery grave. Unfortunately, that’s not the end of Japan’s monster troubles, as a recently unearthed dragon-like kaiju has just wreaked havoc in Matsumoto, leaving few survivors beyond wizened weapons scientist Dr. Murakami (Min Tanaka). Dr. Hoda, now in charge of a specialized group meant to deal with critters like this, taps Shikishima, now a settled family man with his wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe)—whose narrow survival in the last film will factor into the plot in surprising ways—and daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani), to help advise his new group on how to deal with the creature.
What the creature is, and what role he might play in this new feud with Godzilla, we’ve been asked to withhold for surprise’s sake. But suffice it to say that “Minus Zero” taps into Toho history to add new dimensions to Yamazaki’s wartime melodrama. And, of course, the titular titan does show up (eventually), though his presence exists as a force of nature to be steered more than stopped, controlled more than conquered.
And those moments where he or his fellow kaiju show up contain more of Yamazaki’s inventively harrowing scenes of urban destruction: where “Minus One” found oodles of inventive monster tension out on the open sea, “Minus Zero” takes that anxiety to the air in a daring mid-film dogfight. Unlike the first, this one’s rated R, and you can see why: Yamazaki lingers longer on bodies charred from nuclear hellfire or thrown from great heights, and even Godzilla gets a few pieces ripped out of him in ways that feel gorier than we’ve yet seen.
In many ways, much of “Minus Zero” feels like a rehash of similar thematic material from “Minus One,” and suffers from that repetition. The first film gave its characters an emotional catharsis from all the ghosts they chased down in the war; here, with Shikishima and others relatively settled, we have to introduce new characters with their own respective survivor’s guilt or chips on their shoulders. There’s Dr. Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), a meteorologist whose failure to predict a tsunami in time to prevent numerous deaths motivates her to redeem herself alongside Dr. Hoda. And, of course, Dr. Murakami has his own connection to Japan’s nuclear past, which plays out in visions that reveal some of the series’ most haunting atomic images.
Few of these characters are rendered in anything finer than broad strokes, the cast gamely throwing themselves into their two-dimensional roles with gusto. Each of them has their character trait, and they’ll play it with absolute commitment. After all, Yamazaki delights in building collectives of dogged individuals willing to work together to hatch complicated plans to capture, stop, or otherwise dispatch these world-ending threats. Like the previous film, the greatest thrills come from watching our dogged heroes make plans, seeing them fail, and pivoting until they maybe get it right.
In this respect, “Godzilla Minus Zero” echoes the wartime morality plays of classic Hollywood, even as this one veers away from the prior film’s apparent nationalism towards a broader critique of governments and systems and their willingness to throw away collective safety at the altar of tactical superiority. Even Godzilla might be worth keeping around, if the right government can steer him towards their enemies.
The big guy has long been an apt metaphor for postwar Japan’s nuclear anxiety, but that subtext is rendered achingly obvious text in “Minus Zero,” from inventively new scenes of destruction (our new enemy can use energy to lift buildings right out of the sky, “Doctor Strange”-style, and slam them back onto the ground, a legitimately terrifying image) to Japan’s lingering animus towards their new American allies. The US arrives in greater force here, more as paternalistic minders than genuine friends. Like so many Japanese films with English-language sequences, the American actors quaintly chew through awkwardly translated dialogue, rendering them even more alien than the kaiju our heroes are fighting.
But “Minus Zero” finds little romance in its scrappy nationalistic saber-rattling. It’s too preoccupied with the wailing of children who don’t know when their mommies and daddies are coming back, or Spielbergian stares out of train windows at unspeakable devastation. That’s Yamazaki’s stock in trade with his scaled leg of the “Godzilla” series: Using the monster as an avatar for collective wartime guilt, of sublimated urges for revenge against those who dropped the bomb in the first place, and—finally—losing faith in our institutions’ power to protect us and simply clinging to the family and friends we trust.
This review was filed from the premiere at the New York Film Festival. It opens on November 6, 2026.
