The ruler’s back

There have been a few great Godzilla films, and plenty of lousy ones. But not until Godzilla Minus Zero has there been an entry so good that the visual effects and monster fights may be the least of its many virtues.

Yet that is what writer/director Takashi Yamazaki has achieved in this followup to 2023’s stellar Godzilla Minus One. Made with tremendous care, Minus Zero excels because, like its predecessor, it understands that nothing about the titanic creatures stomping around commands more attention than if we care about the people under their feet.

Set two years after the events of Minus One, Japan’s problems are far from over. Minus Zero opens with the classic Godzilla sequence of city-dwellers screaming and on the run, this time in a bravura, street-level long take following a pair of men fleeing for safety while recording evidence of a rampaging monster.

But this monster isn’t the one moviegoers have come to see — he’s now presumed dead.

This draconic entity is a brand-new headache for Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), who we met in Minus One helping pull old mines out of the ocean. Noda is now heading up the Disaster Response Bureau after his ingenuity helped defeat Godzilla.

We learn this new beast can assimilate nearby life. Scientists studying it have named it Ghidorah (in this film, it’s a play on the Greek “chimera”) and now moviegoers know what they’re dealing with — not a random monster but the Apollo Creed to Godzilla’s Rocky Balboa — a beast with which the King of the Monsters has feuded onscreen since 1964.

It’s 1949 and Japan is still rebuilding itself after wartime devastation and the events of the last film. Now there’s a dragon on top of all that. However, Japan’s kaiju problem hasn’t gone unnoticed by the rest of the world — the U.S. closely monitors these developments, and its watchfulness and willingness to provide equipment is met with a degree of unease and cynicism by Noda and his companions. (A U.S. Air Force official bragging to Noda about the payload of a new bomb is a grim little touch.)

Yamazaki finds logical ways to draw Minus One’s crew of volunteer heroes back into the action. Pilot Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is brought back when a daring air raid on Ghidorah comes up short of crew. His partner, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), works at a home for war orphans until her improbable survival at the end of Minus One puts her at the centre of several people’s machinations.

One of many “infected” with Godzilla’s DNA during his attacks in the previous film, Noriko rapidly recovered from what should have been fatal wounds, and she’s the only Godzilla victim who hasn’t yet succumbed to fatal mutations, revealed in a subtle and effective bit of body horror.

Noriko’s “resonance” with Godzilla (spoiler alert: it turns out he’s not as dead as we thought) is crucial to luring him into conflict with Ghidorah.

Rounding out the cast is Masami Nagasawa as meteorologist Makoto Aoyama, whose knack for tracking weather makes her a pro at following thundercloud-engulfed Ghidorah, and veteran actor Min Tanaka (47 Ronin) as a haunted scientist and Hiroshima survivor whose daughter and grandson were killed in the atomic bomb’s blast. Six-year-old Sae Nagatani pulls heartstrings as Koichi and Noriko’s adopted daughter Akiko, who is more aware of how much their domestic peace hangs by a thread than her parents know. Across the board, this cast of characters does great work portraying people carrying far more on their shoulders than they let on.

The effects work here is best-in-show. These creatures have never looked better and Ghidorah, in particular, has a clear personality. This beast is not just intelligent but petty, going out of its way to kill stray humans who seem just on the verge of escape.

There are great sequences showing the heroes jury-rigging novel ways to fight the monsters, choreographing tense scenarios in which, for example, Koichi desperately evades Ghidorah in a fighter plane while a bomber above him tries to dead-drop lightning rods into the monster’s back, hoping to fry it in a storm system.

Minus Zero also shows us the high cost of their failures: CGI-laden spectacles such as this are often pretty bloodless; but this spectacle drives home the consequences of its onscreen action with every heightened scream or hospital hallway packed with wounded and dying.

The inevitable showdown between the two monsters necessarily costs the movie some of its sense of scale, the camera zooming out to take them in as they do battle in the ruined streets of Ginza, but the film makes up for it by making their bout one of the nastier ones in franchise history.

Minus One told a touching story about broken people rediscovering their will to live amid personal and national ruin. Minus Zero reaffirms its predecessor’s views on the value of life, and asks new questions about what we are prepared to do to protect others (and what “protecting” them actually entails), to end bloody cycles, and to choose the path of good despite compelling reasons not to.

It’s quite possibly the best giant-monster movie ever made — entirely because of the human heart beating inside it.

darren.ridgley@freepress.com