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| Images courtesy of Toho |
Godzilla Minus One (2023) was a huge international breakout hit for Toho, even winning an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2024. Critics lauded it not only for its special effects but also for the gripping human drama behind the kaiju destruction, as it explored the ramifications of a war-torn Japan further devastated by Godzilla's rampage. Minus One famously had a small budget for a blockbuster, and it worked with that limitation, but its success has given the sequel, Godzilla Minus Zero (2026), a larger budget, which has had both positive and negative effects on the film.
Two years have passed since the events of the first film, and Japan is well on its way in the post-war reconstruction. Just as things are looking up, a new kaiju pops up and wreaks havoc on the populace, forcing the government to call in previous experts and new help. Former kamikaze pilot KÅichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) has married Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and they are raising their adopted daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani) together. Although they have managed to carve out a life together, the war and Godzilla itself loom heavily over their future.
While it is commonly known that Godzilla is an allegory for the nuclear bomb and the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is almost always hidden under layers of subtext and metaphor (especially in the films following the first one in 1954), and not addressed directly in the films. Though the franchise has gone through many tonal shifts over the decades, from deadly serious to action and occasionally sci-fi campiness, the pendulum always swings back to its somber origins. In the first film, Takashi Yamazaki pulled back the curtain a bit; Godzilla's atomic breath became more literal, causing a mushroom cloud at its epicenter and fallout in its wake.
While there were a number of people who died immediately in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, either from the blast itself or from injuries sustained in the explosion, there were a great number of people who died afterward from complications of radiation poisoning. Information on what radiation sickness was and the long-term effects on an individual's health was unknown, and so many people suffered in silence from a variety of ailments. These poor victims were known as hibakusha, which loosely translates from Japanese as "person affected by nuclear exposure". These hibakusha were subjected to discrimination from their fellow Japanese due to their frail constitution and fear that their condition was contagious and/or hereditary.
Yamazaki draws a direct parallel to humans becoming "infected" by Godzilla, incorporating his gnarled spines into their bodies and giving it a body-horror aesthetic. However, it doesn't stop here; for perhaps the first time in the franchise, there are graphic scenes depicting the aftermath of the bomb, with incinerated corpses and badly burnt victims wandering in the wreckage, holding their charred hands out in front of them, the flesh hanging from their fingertips.
The subtext has now become the text, and Minus Zero has finally acknowledged directly that Godzilla isn't solely a fun creature feature; it's a way for a culture to grapple with a great tragedy. The narrative captures the complexity of the Japanese relationship to Godzilla, and it’s critical of the American version of the franchise, in a way, because it shows the US wanting it for itself. Godzilla symbolizes trauma for the Japanese, but it’s their trauma and not for sale. Godzilla has always teetered between a destructor and a savior, because trauma response isn't a linear path.
As a film, Minus Zero is somewhat all over the place, and the pacing and editing aren't as tight as the first film. This is one downside of the higher budget: the scope is wider, but the focus is too spread out. On the action front, the kaiju battles are transcendent and exhilarating, and Yamazaki's visual effects work is on full display. The immense scale is palpable, and the visual language is executed perfectly, making it easy to tell where the monsters are and what they are doing. It sounds silly to point this out, but many films fail on this front, zooming in too close on the action or obscuring it with rain and fog.
Minus Zero is a nuanced, personal work that might ruffle some feathers, and while the prior film is more palatable as an entertaining blockbuster, this work asks more complex questions with answers not everyone will be comfortable with. Godzilla cannot be separated from the historical suffering that created it, no matter how commercially successful the franchise becomes.
--Michelle Kisner