As with the franchise form itself, regeneration and transformation are the primary concerns of Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus Zero,” a visually mind-boggling, narratively undisciplined follow-up to his “Godzilla Minus One” in 2023.
That movie won the Academy Award for best visual effects, so we know Yamazaki can dazzle. This time, however, spectacle mutes substance as he continues the adventures of the young Shikishima family in 1949, two years after the terrifying attacks of the first film. Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), his wife, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and their adopted daughter, Akiko (Sae Nagatani), are, like everyone else, striving to rebuild their lives. Noriko now wears a patch over an eye damaged by the monster — the only visible reminder of injuries that should have been fatal.
Noriko’s unlikely survival heralds the movie’s most intriguing and potentially fertile idea as a doctor (Jun Kunimura) investigates the possibility that Godzilla’s cells have the ability to affect human biology. Unfortunately, this dip into body horror remains largely undeveloped — a likely tease for future sequels — and poorly explained in a plot with too many loose ends. In another, a handful of American soldiers hint darkly at an agenda that’s never explained, and the exciting theories of a meteorological genius (Masami Nagasawa), who believes Japan’s monster activity is related to the weather, are summarily sidelined. Her ideas are frustratingly vague but, like Noriko’s connection to Godzilla, appear all too easily weaponized when his scaly mug looms over the horizon once again.
This time, he’s not alone. We meet the new creature, Ghidora — a flying dragon of possible alien provenance who spits lightning and regenerates heads like a demented Hydra — mere minutes into the movie as it lays waste to a town and its screaming inhabitants. The sequence is, like several in the film, virtuosic and breathtakingly paced; yet it’s the picture’s doom-laden, despairing tone that chills.
This has less to do with the central family, whose melodramatic dynamics eventually grow tiresome, than with the tortured memories of the scientist Murakami (Min Tanaka). In dreamy, spectral flashbacks (affectingly rendered by the cinematographer Kozo Shibasaki), he recalls the loss of his wife, daughter and grandson in the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. These sections have a somber, clammy power that dampens the exhilaration of the film’s creature-feature capers, but pairs perfectly with Murakami’s secretly smoldering revenge fantasy — the movie’s most shocking and thematically daring visual — against the nation he holds responsible for his grief.
“Who’d have thought we’d be happy to see American planes?” one character remarks when the machines are given to help battle the beasties, but the movie is too immersed in historical trauma to make jokes with more than half its heart. For over 70 years now, Godzilla has been galumphing across our screens, a Nietzschean nightmare — what doesn’t kill him only makes him stronger — and a potent postwar allegory for real-life perils. As such, the spiny brute has always had a poignancy that this new film honors in unexpected ways. In a plot that quietly rings multiple alarms — biological weapons, climate change, shifting global allegiances — “Godzilla Minus Zero” gives us a monster newly burdened with representing more threats than perhaps even he can comfortably carry.
Godzilla Minus Zero Rated R for pulverized infrastructure and pummeled humans. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters.
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