Godzilla Minus Zero review: Ghidorah steals the sky, and Godzilla shows up late to his own movie

Godzilla Minus Zero is a very good monster movie that keeps forgetting who its monster is. Takashi Yamazaki's sequel to Godzilla Minus One has the same ache, a bigger budget for misery, and a three-headed golden dragon that hogs the sky. Godzilla, the name on the poster, spends much of the film waiting in the wings like an understudy who knows he will get the last scene. It is worth the ticket, and worth an IMAX ticket if you can find one. Just do not expect the small, perfect shock of the first film.

Ghidorah gets the first act, and the best entrance#

The film picks up two years after Minus One. Japan is still rebuilding. Then Ghidorah arrives and flattens Matsumoto, lifting its people into the air with anti-gravity breath before dropping them. It is a nasty, beautiful image, and Yamazaki knows it.

TIME's Stephanie Zacharek calls Ghidorah "an elegant flying beastie straight from the margins of a medieval manuscript", which is about right. He is small-headed, furious and golden. He also regenerates, which is the kind of detail that tells you the script has big plans for the second hour.

Deadline's review notes the irony that the title star is "really just a supporting player in his own movie" for much of the running time. The AV Club puts it more bluntly: the sequel comes "dangerously close to being Godzilla Minus Godzilla." That is unfair to the big guy's eventual scenes, but not unfair to the clock.

The family is back, and so is the guilt#

Ryunosuke Kamiki returns as Koichi Shikishima, the former kamikaze pilot who survived and cannot forgive himself for it. Minami Hamabe is back as Noriko, and the couple are raising young Akiko. Hidetaka Yoshioka's Noda now runs a bureau built to handle giant disasters, which is a sensible thing for postwar Japan to have by this point. New faces include Masami Nagasawa as a meteorologist and Min Tanaka as Professor Murakami, a Hiroshima survivor with no warm feelings for the U.S. military.

This is where Yamazaki earns his keep. The human scenes are not filler between explosions. They are the point. RogerEbert.com's critic notes that the film is preoccupied with "the wailing of children" and with long stares out of train windows at ruined cities. Yamazaki uses the monsters as a stand-in for wartime guilt and for a loss of faith in the people who were supposed to keep everyone safe.

The trouble is that there are now more of these people, and more plans. The AV Club argues that Yamazaki has traded the first film's community-building for "endless exposition dumps and go-nowhere plans." We would put it more kindly. The plans go somewhere. They just take the scenic route, and they stop to explain themselves at every station.

It is rated R, and it shows#

Minus One was PG-13. This one is rated R for bloody images and some violent content. RogerEbert.com says Yamazaki lingers on bodies charred by nuclear fire, and that even Godzilla takes damage that looks gorier than before.

The choice is deliberate. Yamazaki has said the film is partly a response to Oppenheimer, which did not show what the bomb did to human bodies. One brief dream sequence makes that point without a lecture. It is the most serious minute in a film that already takes itself very seriously, and it lands.

Parents who took a 10-year-old to the last one should know the rating is not a typo.

The effects are still the reason to buy a big ticket#

Yamazaki wrote, directed and supervised the visual effects again. Deadline reports he worked with a small effects team, adding only a handful of artists to the crew that won the Oscar for Minus One. The film was shot with IMAX in mind, and Deadline says the format complements the widescreen look rather than smothering it.

RogerEbert.com singles out a mid-film dogfight that moves the first film's sea-bound tension into the air. Koichi is a pilot, so of course he ends up in a cockpit again. The franchise is not subtle about its hero's unfinished business, and neither are we.

When Godzilla does arrive, he is worth the wait. Zacharek describes him as having "the body of a tyrant and the mind of a toddler," which is the best one-line summary of the character in seventy years.

What critics and audiences say#

Critics mostly agree it is excellent but a step down. On Rotten Tomatoes it sits at 90 percent from 187 reviews, with a 96 percent audience score. The AV Club still calls it "an above-average Godzilla film." Audiences agreed with their wallets. It opened at No. 1 with about $30.6 million in the U.S. and Canada, per Box Office Mojo over November 6 to 8.

Basics are from Rotten Tomatoes and Deadline. The film is in Japanese with subtitles.

The verdict#

Godzilla Minus Zero is the rare sequel that remembers why the first one worked: people first, monster second. It just remembers it a little too hard, and for a little too long. Bring tissues for the family scenes and patience for the briefings. The lizard will be along shortly.

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