Movies & TV Godzilla Minus Zero Godzilla Minus Zero Is a Dark, Loud, and Emotionally Gutting Kaiju Opera Takashi Yamazaki has given us another celebration of the power of LOVE. And giant screaming monsters. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on November 5, 2026 Credit: Toho Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Toho Studios All else aside, we live in a world where the New York Film Festival hosted the U.S. premiere of Godzilla Minus Zero. I was lucky enough to see the movie twice over the course of the Festival, and I’ll admit I went in with some trepidation. How could the new film possibly live up to 2023’s Godzilla Minus One? I’m not sure it does—it might actually surpass it? I’m still thinking about that! But if you just want to know whether or not to see it, the answer is yes! It’s a loud, terrifying, awesome rollercoaster. The performances are emotionally gutting, the action sequences are stellar, and it’s the first Japanese film made for IMAX, so see it in that format if you can! Takashi Yamazaki is back as not just the writer and director, but has also worked on the visual effects once again, along with VFX Director Kiyoko Shibuya, and Takayuki Ueki, and Eishin Okubo. All the principle actors from the first film are back, along with some excellent additions to the cast. There are a couple of sequences that made my audiences applaud. There is one sequence that would be my favorite scene of the year—if not for  the “Who’s On First” scene in You Can See Everything, and, well, the entirety of The Devils restoration. I’m going to try to talk about the new one without spoiling anything, because you want to go in as cold as possible. The thing about Godzilla Minus One was that in addition to being a big, fun, LOUD action movie, it took the idea of Godzilla seriously. What would it actually be like if Godzilla attacked Japan mere months after the end of World War II, and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What would it be like to be a young person barely scratching out survival in a defeated nation, orphaned, betrayed by your government, with no real hope for the future… and then a literal fucking unstoppable monster rises from the sea and attacks your home? At that point, how would you not just lie down, close your eyes, and wait for it all to be over? Yamazaki took those questions and thought through them. What if one character was a “failed” kamikaze pilot, who now faces a future he wasn’t even supposed to have? What if you were half-mad from the grief of being orphaned, only to have someone hand you a terrified baby and disappear without a trace? What if your whole family and world and life were destroyed, but you had to find a way to build a friendship with someone who betrayed everything you believed in? What if you knew that your work had led to the deaths of countless people, that you could never make amends, but you just kept waking up anyway? In Minus One, those questions become characters: the kamikaze pilot, Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) who builds an unlikely relationship with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and the baby she’s now caring for Akiko (Sae Nagatani). The three become the neighbors of Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando), who initially treats the makeshift family as an emotional punching bag for all of her grief. And all of them end up forming an alliance with scientist Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) when Godzilla attacks. The movie isn’t (just) about Godzilla stomping stuff, it’s about how these five people, and some friends and allies they gain along the way, fight back against certain doom. How they choose hope over despair, again and again. Each time I watched Minus One in the theater, I noticed the same pattern: people would start off vocally excited by Godzilla, even cheering his attacks—but by the last third of the film I’d hear sniffling. By the film’s end I’d hear open sobs from the people around me. The challenge that stood before Godzilla Minus Zero was matching that level of intensity. Part of the first film’s success was the surprise that a monster movie from a very long-running franchise could suddenly show up in theaters with an incredibly moving anti-war message. Now that we’re familiar with Yamazaki’s game, how could the new film possibly do anything new? The answer is that it doesn’t exactly try to. Rather than try to recreate that element of surprise, Yamazaki and his crew and actors dig even deeper into the themes of the first film—and they also make a couple of truly unhinged choices that I think transcend the first film. Shikishima and Noriko, still nursing physical and emotional injuries sustained in the the first movie, have tentatively built a life together with Akiko. Shikishima works as a pilot now, and Noriko helps out in the school/foster home that Sumiko runs for children orphaned in either the war or the Godzilla attacks. They lead a quiet life punctuated by occasional visits from the crew of the Shinsei Maru, the ship that Shikishima worked on after the war, which led to his meet-cute with Noda. And speaking of Noda. My favorite character from the last movie is now heading up the hilariously named “Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau”, and has gained new allies in Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka), a biologist, and “weather forecasting prodigy” Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), a woman who has the same single-minded determination to her work as he does to his. (She uses weather patterns to predict the movements of a new threat that looms on the horizon, and it’s ludicrous but also awesome.) There’s also a small but vital appearance from The Wailing’s Jun Kunimura as Noriko’s doctor. All three of these additions bring new arcs, new weight, and some fascinating quirks to the story. Photo Credit: Toho But about that new threat. Technically it makes itself known in the terrifying opening scenes of the film, but I wanted to ground everyone first before we got there. I don’t want to spoil the nature of the threat for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie. I’ll just say here that it builds on all the horrors that were wreaked in the last film, and will, I think, delight fans of this franchise. The new threat also leads our heroes to make a decision that in lesser hands might seem almost comic, but instead plays out as a solemn moral choice that everyone thinks might doom them, spiritually speaking. And all weighty thematic stuff aside, when the choice actually plays out, it’s fucking awesome. The element that I think makes Minus Zero the equal to its predecessor is related to that moral choice. Yamazaki’s script digs even harder into the open wounds of World War II. Shikishima and Noriko are both still healing from the last movie, Akiko is barely functional, and getting dragged into a new nightmare tears whatever healing they’ve managed to shreds. But even more than that, another character is revealed to be a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, still overwhelmed with grief for his lost family. His trauma, and his plans for vengeance, create one of the most thrilling scenes in the film, but Yamazaki never uses his pain for shock value. This film is intense. The new threat brings with it harrowing scenes of catastrophe and death. Possibly even more so, the flashbacks to Hiroshima are exactly as upsetting as they should be. Yamazaki made this film partially as a response to Oppenheimer, to show some of the horrors that Christopher Nolan (wisely, I’d say) chose to leave offscreen. (You can read about this decision in this Time article, but be warned that there are spoilers here that I didn’t include in this review.) I talked a little about the parallels between Oppenheimer and Godzilla Minus One in my review of that film, and I’m really pleased to see the ways Yamazaki chose to confront Nolan’s masterpiece here. Scenes that would have been hideously inadequate in the biopic of the Father of the Atomic Bomb instead show the Japanese experience of the bombing, the aftermath, the sense of reality itself being knocked off its axis, and it adds them to the context of the Godzilla franchise, which has always been a response to the atomic age. The film doesn’t cheapen the horrors of the war. At one point, characters travel through a region that’s been decimated by violence, and we’re made to sit with them in the aftermath—not just wrecked buildings, but real human beings in agony from their injuries, parents mourning children who die in their arms, lives that are irreparably broken. The movie takes this seriously, and doesn’t allow us to look away. Screenshot: TOHO Another thing I love is that the role of Americans is uncompromising. The Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau cannot trust them, and they know that—but the Americans also have weaponry and funds that might save Japan from the new threat. How many compromises have to be made? As in Minus One, the needs and desires of Shikishima and Noriko’s little makeshift family are set against the needs of their larger society. Is it heroism to protect your partner and child if it means saying no to a battle that threatens your whole country? What do any of them owe to Japan, after everything they’ve already given? Once again, the people of the Disaster Response Bureau have to macgyver a solution to a kaiju-sized problem, and once again it would be ludicrous if it wasn’t so fucking fun to watch. Godzilla Minus Zero is big and bold and just as operatically emotional as the first one, and by the end I found myself tearing up and beaming with happiness and hope just like last time, so maybe the 2020s simply demand an over-the-top kaiju movie every now and then.[end-mark] The post <em>Godzilla Minus Zero</em> Is a Dark, Loud, and Emotionally Gutting Kaiju Opera appeared first on Reactor.