Before you read the rest of this review, know this going in: I thought Godzilla Minus One was a bad movie. It was strained in its emotional tenor, loaded with ciphers of the Spielbergian variety, and constrained by a nationalist political siren call that could be heard all the way out here in the West. So I found the overwhelming praise for Takashi Yamazaki’s traditionalist take on the franchise, from colleagues and close friends alike, bewildering. That was especially true in the wake of Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, a gorgeously rendered, hilarious, satirical riff on this creaky old saw. But somehow, much of the world fell under the spell of failed-kamikaze-pilot tears and paeans to the imagery of the island’s devastation that Ishiro Honda perfected seventy-plus years ago. Heck, it’s the only Godzilla movie to win an Oscar (Best Visual Effects, which amounts to the Best Blockbuster Award).
As it turns out, that kind of prestige can be a double-edged sword, especially for a franchise with a spotty track record of follow-ups. Case in point: the strangely-titled Godzilla Minus Zero. Wouldn’t that just be Godzilla? Is something getting lost in localization?
By the by, if I seem vague on details, it’s because the studio has asked critics not to reveal certain plot points, even ones central to any discussion of the film’s strengths and weaknesses.
Yamazaki returns for this new outing, which picks up a couple of years after the events of Minus One. A new kaiju has emerged (one that longtime fans, and even casual ones, will no doubt recognize) and is wreaking havoc in Matsumoto. In response, Dr. Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) springs into action. He runs Japan’s Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, basically a government agency established to deal with monsters like Godzilla, and he sets out to recruit the same pilots who won the day last time. That includes the long emotionally battered Kōichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), who has settled into something approaching domesticity with his wife, Noriko (Minami Hamabe). She has mostly recovered from the injuries she sustained during Godzilla’s attack, though she now wears an eyepatch as a lasting consequence. Fatherhood has become part of the package as well: the couple has adopted the orphaned Akiko (Sae Nagatani), so the stakes have risen ever higher for the redeemed hero.
And that’s before Godzilla returns… somehow. The movie doesn’t clearly explain how, which is fine. But it does underline a growing gap between what the filmmakers want to do and what the material actually demands.
In classic Godzilla movies, things just sort of happen. Some radiation thing brings everyone’s favorite monster back to life so he can wreak havoc again. An errant meteorite crashes to Earth, and now there’s a giant three-headed dragon shooting lightning out of its mouths for Godzilla to fight. There’s a mystical island with twins who can control a giant moth. Godzilla is pulp. Godzilla is dumb fun. That’s fine. The original film was the exception, with its strain of justified anger at the slaughter of innocents by an enemy force, and Anno’s satire was another. Otherwise? It’s largely been a romp.
But it seems no one passed that note along to Yamazaki and his team, who have ventured where few have gone before: blending weepy melodrama with silly subplots that basically amount to magic. Everyone involved seems convinced that audiences clamored for the “characters” rather than a Godzilla outing with bog-standard competent storytelling. So with this sequel, we check in on how much of the returning ensemble is faring, including a beefed-up role for Dr. Noda. We also get new additions like the enigmatic Professor Murakami (Min Tanaka), who admittedly anchors some of the most bravura sequences of the whole shebang. And then there’s Makoto (Masami Nagasawa), who works under Dr. Noda and has some heretofore unexplained, borderline-precognitive knack for forecasting the weather. It’s as if the creative team decided the tortured lead of the previous movie was such a success that they needed to replicate him multiple times over. They do it through proxies nursing their own wartime wounds, or through rod-stiff experts who radiate a bland competence.
There’s so much story here, with each of these characters fighting for a place in the sun, that the focus on them muscles out what most people come to one of these for. That sacrifice would be worthwhile if there were something compelling to grab onto, but instead we’re left with reheated leftovers from the last movie. At a certain point, between all the meetings and plans and nonsensical science delivered in the most po-faced way possible, I started losing track of what exactly was happening. That’s not how these should go. At least Minus One had saccharine simplicity on its side.
That said, it’s again the battle of tones that makes Godzilla Minus Zero such a discordant viewing experience. Characters choke back tears in huge displays of capital-A Acting at every turn. The possibility of a character destroying years of Godzilla research is treated with the same gravity as Oppenheimer turning against the bomb. Collectively, we’ve become numb to pop-culture detritus being treated with the weight of prestige drama. Here, though, the default mode seems to be anime-level BIG performances, right down to the choking noises characters make as they swallow their overwhelming emotions, and it’s impossible to take seriously.
And then the film wraps it all up in a baffling way, with characters making turns that fly in the face of everything you’ve just seen, all for the sake of expediency.
Thankfully, when the kaiju do appear, the film shines. The new creature looks outstanding, and I’d argue (it isn’t hard) that it’s the best and fiercest it has ever looked. I continue to admire the Godzilla redesign, too, though I think he lacks some of the otherworldly majesty of Anno’s take. (Nothing will ever top the image of laser beams shooting out of his back like a ’70s rock concert.) An especially excellent early flying sequence, with our pilots trying to stop the new threat, is thrilling and ranks among my favorite sequences in the franchise’s history. But these moments are just peppered here and there rather than serving as the main course. And that’s a shame.
If you’re going in looking for tons of monstrous carnage, you’ve got a lot to wade through to get there, and the payoff is unlikely to fully satisfy. If you’re looking for more postwar dramatic reckoning, there’s some of that here, but the previous film drilled so far down into it that there’s little new to mine. In the end, nobody wins, but I guess that’s what happens when you can’t pick a lane. And once again, they waste Sakura Ando, which at this point should be an international crime.