Godzilla Minus Zero, 2026.
Directed by Takashi Yamazaki
Starring Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Yuki Yamada, Kuranosuke Sasaki, Sakura Ando, and Miou Tanaka.
SYNOPSIS:
Set in 1949, the Shikishima family confronts a fresh catastrophe two years their previous ordeal with the legendary monster.
How do you follow in the Kaiju-sized footsteps left by 2023’s stupendous Godzilla Minus One? The danger would be to use the age-old rule of sequels and throw more behemoths at the screen, to go bigger. Jurassic Park introduced more dinosaurs, so much so that by the time we got to Rebirth, they were creating creatures that wouldn’t look out of place in a Toho feature, the idea had been stretched so thin. The key here, and why it worked so well the first time around, is to retain the humanity. Make the small things count, and then the giant monsters are merely a bonus.
Writer, director, and Academy Awards winning VFX maestro Takashi Yamazaki clearly understands this, and so the formula for Godzilla Minus Zero is more-of-the-same, and in this case that isn’t a bad thing.
Set two years after the Jaws-inspired takedown of Godzilla saved Japan, we are back in the company of Hidetaka Yoshioka’s Dr. Kenji Noda and his Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau. It’s kinda like the OG Monarch, and Zero throws them and the audience in at the deep end with the arrival of a terrifying new Kaiju named Ghidorah.
Like one of Daenerys’ dragons, this huge winged serpent lays waste to Matsumoto City during the film’s opening sequence. It’s an immediate reminder of the incredible VFX work Yamazaki and his team are capable of, the quality of which never lets up. The implementation of the creature effects are the best since Phil Tippet and Stan Winston in ’93. They are imbued with a weight, scale, and movement that makes them a threat, awe-inspiring, and feel incredibly real, all at the same time.
Even more impressive is the way in which these Titans are rendered during Minus Zero‘s action sequences. The clarity, the lack of a hundreds of unnecessary, incoherent fast cuts and edits is so refreshing. There is an airborne dogfight between three fighter planes and Ghidorah that features so many moving parts and manoeuvres between beast and machine, yet Yamazaki chooses to hold the shots for as long as possible, so that the audience are able to make sense of the visuals and geography of what’s actually happening onscreen. It’s the same during the climactic battle, which is a multi-character, multi-monster showdown, but it’s all so meticulously constructed and easy to follow.
As well as following the government’s efforts to stop these Titans, the story also follows the fortunes of Minus One‘s Shikishima family; Kamikaze pilot turned advisor Kōichi (Ryuunosuke Kamiki), his daughter Akiko, and wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe), whose close encounter with Godzilla in the previous film becomes one of the driving elements of the story.
In fact, Yamazaki makes a point of pushing his female characters to the front line of Godzilla Minus Zero. Masami Nagasawa steps up as a meteorological expert who fills the disaster movie role of a scientist whose idea might just work, and in keeping with many of the themes that resonate against a backdrop of 2026, a lot of screentime is afforded to Akiko’s childhood war-trauma and fear of abandonment.
As for the scaly old star of the show, Toho’s Titan hasn’t looked this good in all his 70-odd years of beam-spewing and building stomping. Like the nuclear blue hue that shoots up Godzilla’s back, his introduction to the story, wonderfully held back for a long time, will send shivers up the spine like Avengers portals or Gandalf arriving at Helm’s Deep.
Towering side-by-side with its predecessor, every bit its equal, Godzilla Minus Zero might be slightly more unwieldy, but by once again employing stunning VFX to compliment a human story of accountability in conflict, one that holds a mirror up to our broken world, the result is simply incredible blockbuster filmmaking.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
