Godzilla Minus Zero review: Fails to live up to predecessor
Godzilla Minus One was one of the biggest surprises of 2023. I absolutely adored it and was blown away by the scale and visual effects. While the sequel, Godzilla Minus Zero, still delivers on those two fronts, I felt let down by the story as a whole.
Picking up in 1949, two years after the first film, Dr Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) is now the director of the government’s Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau. When a dragon-like kaiju, Ghidorah, attacks Matsumoto City, he turns to pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) for help. But the humans are no match for this monster, and they devise a plan to get Godzilla to fight Ghidorah instead.
The first Japanese movie to be filmed for IMAX, Godzilla Minus Zero is a staggering visual achievement. The previous film deservedly won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and I hope the sequel does too, because the effects somehow manage to be even better this time around. The details and texture in the creature designs and the jaw-dropping scenes of destruction are even more impressive, and the scale is even more ambitious, with double the amount of kaiju effects as its predecessor.
There are also some exciting and truly cinematic action setpieces, particularly the early Ghidorah appearances, but they don’t surpass what came before. Godzilla doesn’t have enough screen time or enough to do, and the final battle is anticlimactic and falls short of the water-based showdown in Minus One. I’ve never been a huge fan of watching massive CGI monsters duking it out, so I prefer sequences with just one titan.
My biggest complaint with the first film remains the same: the acting and writing. The dialogue is iffy and the acting is poor at times, particularly when a scene calls for emotion. Minus One had a perfect balance between the human story and the kaiju action, whereas the human-to-action ratio is off here and the human story isn’t as compelling. That said, I really liked an unexpected reveal about Koichi’s wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe), the references to the Hiroshima bombing and an exploration of how the Japanese are rebuilding after the war.
Godzilla Minus Zero, directed by Takashi Yamazaki once again, is an impressive cinematic spectacle, but I would have liked fewer planning conversations, more Godzilla and better acting.
In cinemas from Friday 6th November