{"id":783784,"date":"2026-09-27T00:54:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T00:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/783784\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T00:54:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T00:54:22","slug":"godzilla-minus-zero-review-a-sequel-thats-better-in-almost-every-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/783784\/","title":{"rendered":"Godzilla Minus Zero Review: A Sequel that’s Better in Almost Every Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

Asked to explain the goofy title he gave to his globally successful 2023 kaiju smash \u201cGodzilla Minus One,<\/a>\u201d writer-director Takashi Yamazaki explained<\/a> that it was meant to convey two co-equal things: 1.) That the movie took place before Ishir\u014d Honda\u2019s original \u201cGodzilla,\u201d and 2.) That \u201cpeople rise up from a postwar Japan that is at zero, and then Godzilla<\/a> arrives, making the situation even worse and more tragic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Continuing the story of its Oscar-winning predecessor while also doubling down on everything that made it the most acclaimed film<\/a> in its franchise since the King of the Monsters first lumbered out of the Pacific Ocean in 1954, Yamazaki\u2019s thunderously loud and frequently spectacular direct sequel has in turn been saddled with an even sillier title: \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero<\/a>.\u201d To paraphrase the scene from \u201cSideways\u201d where Paul Giamatti\u2019s character reveals that his novel is called \u201cThe Day After Yesterday\u201d: Isn\u2019t that just\u2026 \u201cGodzilla?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Taylor<\/a> \"Werwulf\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

Yes and no. Sure, the title is absurd on its face, but \u2014 in keeping with Yamazaki\u2019s logic \u2014 it also rather eloquently speaks to the premise of a film about a fragile people who are struggling to maintain (and build upon) the new equilibrium they\u2019ve fought so hard to achieve in the years since their country became the epicenter of Earth\u2019s nuclear era. Another mid-century melodrama with very occasional monster sightings, the more thematically coherent and emotionally affecting \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero\u201d expands on the naive grassroots nationalism of its predecessor by reframing that movie\u2019s characters from victims to survivors, an emphasis that forces ex-kamikaze pilot K\u014dichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his friends to confront a series of impossible questions. How do you balance grief with growth? Vengeance with peace? Self-sacrifice with self-preservation?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

By way of answering those questions (or at least asking them in a variety of increasingly anguished ways), \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero\u201d also forces Shikishima and co. to confront a flying, IMAX-sized, three-headed asshole they come to know as King Ghidorah. Possibly the single most hateable kaiju<\/a> who\u2019s ever eaten innocent civilians on screen before, King Ghidorah is a real piece of work even before he earns his crown. He first rears his ugly dragon head in Matsumoto circa 1949, which is two years after the events of \u201cGodzilla Minus One,\u201d and maybe two weeks after this scaly destroyer of worlds crash-landed into the mountains of Japan on the back of a meteorite (an arbitrary point of origin that feels like a missed opportunity to freight Ghidora with more human-facing pathos). Seeing as how Godzilla was obliterated and left to rot at the bottom of the sea at the end of the previous film, Ghidora is free to terrorize the countryside whenever he isn\u2019t taking cute little naps in the Nagano hills.<\/p>\n

Lucky for Japan, and for all of the other nations that are still living under the delusion that none of this monster business will ever be their problem, at least one of the key heroes who \u201cdefeated\u201d Godzilla in 1947 has been preparing his people for the possibility of another kaiju attack. Government higher-ups are still nowhere to be seen, but Einstein-haired Naval engineer Noda (a sweet and eccentrically professorial Hidetaka Yoshioka) has been appointed to the head of the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, where he\u2019s joined by newcomer Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), a preternaturally gifted meteorologist whose ability to predict the weather proves crucial in the fight against Ghidorah, and also embittered biologist Kanji Murakami (\u201cTwilight Samurai\u201d star Min Tanaka), who survived the bombing of Hiroshima, the attack on Ginza in \u201cGodzilla Minus One,\u201d and the assault on Matsumoto that opens this film \u2014 a detail that evokes the terribly remarkable story of Tsutomo Yamaguchi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Noda\u2019s hard-earned wisdom, \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero\u201d is able to skip over the part where everyone has to discover that kaiju like Ghidorah are immune to conventional weapons \u2014 if not also strengthened by them. That ignorance is reserved for the occupying Americans, who were entirely absent from the previous movie (which nostalgically privileged the self-reliance of Japan\u2019s civilian population at the expense of a more historical view of the post-war struggle). Here, the U.S. Army is represented by a unit of square-jawed, power-hungry jerks who are only interested in helping Japan so far as it helps themselves. They don\u2019t bear the wounds of nuclear devastation, and so they see kaiju as more of an opportunity than a threat.<\/p>\n

The opposite is true for our pal Shikishima, who has absolutely no interest in ever climbing back into the cockpit of a fight plane. Now married to the angelic Noriko \u2014 Minami Hamabe, who miraculously escaped \u201cGodzilla Minus One\u201d with a new eyepatch and some big secrets \u2014 and embracing his role as adoptive father to the devastatingly cute Akiko (returning champion Sae Nagatani), Shikishima just wants to wear his cool brown leather jacket and messenger bag combo in peace.<\/p>\n

\"'Godzilla\u2018Godzilla Minus Zero\u2019GKIDS<\/p>\n

If only it were that simple. If only Shikishima were convinced, as he tries to convince himself, that staying out of the fight is the best way to protect the women he loves. If only Noda\u2019s plan of electrocuting Ghidorah to death in the skies above Matsumoto were as successful at killing the kaiju as it is at blowing our hair back.<\/p>\n

There are only two sustained monster sequences in \u201cMinus Zero,\u201d which adheres to a similar cadence as its predecessor, but they\u2019re both among the most gripping setpieces of their kind in all of moviedom; they match the grandeur \u2014 if not the majesty \u2014 of those from Gareth Edwards\u2019 \u201cGodzilla,\u201d and eclipse their violent intensity. The ridiculously thrilling aerial sequence above Matsumoto is lifted by the Wagnerian strings of Naoki Sat\u014d\u2019s visceral score, kept aloft by special effects that exponentially improve upon the resourceful but weightless CGI from \u201cMinus One,\u201d and seared into your retinas by IMAX razzledazzle of the highest magnitude. And while the final showdown between Ghidorah and Godzilla is slightly weakened by grayscale atmospherics and a few missing beats (one of them very bizarre), it goes without saying that the climatic brawl is one for the ages, as Yamazaki earns the franchise\u2019s first \u201cR\u201d rating with an elegantly choreographed monster mash that rattles with Darwinian force.<\/p>\n

Oh yeah, I suppose it also goes without saying that Godzilla is (eventually) in this Godzilla movie. Somehow, the King of the Monsters has returned \u2014 if Palpatine had infinitely regenerative flesh, perhaps his resurrection would have been similarly unsurprising. But fans of Honda\u2019s original film, Yamazaki\u2019s previous one, and\/or Edwards\u2019 failed 2014 reboot have come to expect and appreciate that Godzilla is most effective when framed as more of a recurring weather phenomenon than a dramatic engine in his own right, and \u201cGodzilla Minus Zero\u201d doesn\u2019t suffer from its title kaiju\u2019s limited screentime.<\/p>\n

On the contrary, his absences are crucial to the construction of a florid tear-jerker about a traumatized country trying to move forward in the atomic shadow of a world that will never feel safe again. While a cursed biologist like Murakami might see vengeance as his only path towards peace, a former kamikaze like Shikishima \u2014 the guilt he once felt over not killing himself for Japan now bent towards the responsibility he feels towards living for Noriko and their daughter \u2014 is left to wrestle over the best way to protect his family: fighting the monsters, or fleeing from them.<\/p>\n

\u201cGodzilla Minus Zero\u201d is hardly the most nuanced or effective film to explore its country\u2019s post-war despair (the original \u201cGodzilla\u201d still towers above it in that regard, to say nothing of \u201cDrunken Angel,\u201d \u201cThe Human Condition,\u201d \u201cAn Inn at Osaka,\u201d or any number of other cornerstones of Japanese cinema), but the anger it assigns to Murakami is provocative on its own terms, and the path that it contrives for Shikishima is considerably more nuanced and well-earned than the one he stumbled through before. While the future is still uncertain by the end of this latest Godzilla movie (which feels very much like the middle chapter of a trilogy), \u201cMinus Zero\u201d makes rewarding sense of why the series\u2019 numbers are starting to add up.<\/p>\n

Grade: B+<\/p>\n

\u201cGodzilla Minus Zero\u201d premiered at the 2026 New York Film Festival. GKIDS will release it in U.S. theaters on Friday, November 6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Asked to explain the goofy title he gave to his globally successful 2023 kaiju smash \u201cGodzilla Minus One,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":783785,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2332,183920,2839,247611,129,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-783784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-godzilla-minus-zero","tag-movies","tag-nyff","tag-reviews","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=783784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}