The big guy is back and he’s better than ever. If anyone thought that the title character of GODZILLA MINUS ONE was really dead at the end of that magnificent effort, well, aren’t you adorable? Takashi Yamazaki is far from finished with re-imagining the iconic post-war monster who embodied a host of fears from Cold War paranoia to the genetic mutations brought on by the A-bombs dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once again, he stays true to the spirit of the first incarnation of Godzilla, but he has brought a distinctive new take to the proceedings. IN GODZILLA MINUS ZERO, Cold War politics play through the subtext, while the lingering effects of both Hiroshima and close encounters with Godzilla continue to impact Japan in general, and our returning characters in particular.
It is 1949, two years since the events of MINUS ONE wherein former kamikaze pilot Kôichi Shikishima (Ryûnosuke Kamiki) used his ace flying skills to win round one against Godzilla. He also won the heart of Noriko Ôishi (Minami Hamabe), a plucky woman who survived Godzilla destroying the Ginza, and made a home with her for their doughty adopted daughter, Akiko (Sae Nagatani). Post-war tensions are still simmering between the Japanese and the American military occupation, but that doesn’t affect Kôichi, at least not until a new threat appears. This time it falls from the sky on a meteorite that crashes dramatically into the countryside and promptly begins feeding on the local fauna in a particularly unusually, not to mention unsettling, manner. Fortunately, Kenjo Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), the Naval weapons specialist from the first film is hard at work monitoring the world for more kaiju with the able assistance of crack meteorologist Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), an enthusiastic team player still blaming herself for a botched forecast that resulted in many casualties a few years back.
There’s no time to dwell on that, though, as casualties stack up when a new kaiju wreaks fire-breathing terror on Matsumoto City. The only survivors are Professor Kanji Murakami and his assistant, a biologist with a troubled past, and his assistant, Hagiwara (Min Tanaka), who will do little more than underscore the terror that he and the professor have endured when telling the tale to Noda and his team. In short order, a plan is formulated and Kôichi is plucked from the bosom of his family in order to once again take to the skies and rid the world of a kaiju menace.
The film starts with that menace in a rousing action sequence that shows us Ghidorah in action. It’s a spiky serpentine flying beast who breathes fire and wastes little time in destroying Matsumoto City with his aerial skills and his flamboyant form of aggression. Yamazaki, who also did the VFX, revels in those effects and the bombastic kaiju displays, but he also gets us close to the monster, finding simmering menace, for example, in the way it opens its eye. There are many battles fought against Ghidorah, and, of course, Godzilla, who makes his return rising from the ocean as even the whales haul baleen in order to get away from him. True to the mythos, the atomic bomb that was supposed to kill him has, instead, made him even stronger, with those back spikes exploding from his back in a radioactive blue glow with even more vehement verve.
There’s more than mere firepower being lobbed at these two. Professor Murukami is hypothesizing about the chimeral nature of Ghidorah, preparing us for its fantastical transformation into King Ghidoraha. That’s a moment of pure poetry amid the rubble as the creature composes his sinuous components into a triumphal pose, howling magnificently while regenerating itself. And here we have one of Yamazaki’s strengths. Action is all very well and good, as is the swelling score of melodramatic proportions, and the de rigeur wallows in child pathos as Akiko dissolves into tears at the thought of yet another kaiju or another abandonment by her father. It’s the details, however, that make his kaiju movies richer than mere escapism, as when the light reflects off the professor’s eyeglasses, making them a blank white that oozes portent. It’s also his social commentary that is woven seamlessly into a story about evolution that might not always be aiming towards improvement. The professor’s discovery about a heretofore unexpected biological phenomenon in Godzilla; the upgrade to King Ghidorah’s fire breathing that makes one nostalgic for mere incendiary exhalation; the way grief can fester into something malignant.
To be sure this is a spectacle of a film, but the characters are more than mere avatars and the actors involved run with it. Kamiki is eye candy, but he carries the burden of heroic perfection with a refreshing humility. Hamabe is noble, and deeply soulful, even while suffering from an eye injury that won’t heal properly after being buried in the rubble of Godzilla’s Ginza attack. Even a minor character such as Aunt Sumiko, who runs home for war orphans, has a grumpy humanity as played by Sakura Andô. The star, even if he gets lower billing, is Hidetaka Yoshioka, he of the wild hair and a look of horrified disbelief. Amid the heroics and nobility around him, he is the audience’s proxy, watching the unimaginable with the suitable expression of shock and awe that the situation requires. His character of Noda was given much to philosophical musings about the futility of war in the last film, and while there is less of it here, Yoshioka’s presence still conveys that sorrow as the body count continues to grow while fighting a different enemy. Kôichi and Noriko are the romance in the story, Akiko is the pull of family, but Yoshioka’s Noda is its heart.
GODZILLA MINUS ZERO sweeps us along with the monumental effects of the kaiju, and the deeply personal stories of the humans caught up in the invasion of same. It’s, ahem, enormous fun made all the better for its promise of another installment in the near future.
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