New York film festival: The follow-up to 2023’s Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One dazzles with smart social commentary and jaw-dropping effects
Even by the standards of older movie stars catching a major second wind later in their careers, Godzilla pulled off an impressive reclamation of the spotlight three years ago. Godzilla Minus One, the most recent reboot featuring the 70-year-old kaiju – the version(s) from his native Japan, mind, not the Americanized one concurrently starring in a series of Warner Bros blockbusters opposite King Kong – wasn’t just another monster-movie success. It fully crossed over, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese-language movie ever released in North America, and won an Academy Award to boot for its terrific visual effects. Now. Japanese Godzilla characters are mainstream enough to pop up in Happy Meals, and the Toho-made sequel Godzilla Minus Zero is world-premiering at the New York film festival. Arguably the artsiest, brainiest of the major fall fests is playing unexpected host to a truly spectacular monster battle royale, packaged alongside some of the same thoughtful historical context that informed the previous film.
Writer, director and VFX maestro Takashi Yamazaki returns for the sequel, bringing his lead characters back with him. In the previous film, former military pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) used his experience with Godzilla to overcome his guilt and shame over failing to complete a pointless kamikaze mission toward the end of the second world war – the devastation of which brought Japan back to “zero”, hence a newly emergent Godzilla bringing the country to “minus one”. Minus Zero catches up with Kōichi, his now-wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and their adopted daughter Akiko (Sae Nagatani) two years later, in 1949 (although Akiko somehow seems more or less the same age). Another monster threat looms over post-war Japan in the form of a dragon-like creature dubbed Ghidorah, whose menace will be familiar to kaiju fans. (Though he isn’t seen directly in trailers, this isn’t a spoiler; he’s featured from the very first scene of the film.)