G Watch: Godzilla Minus Zero (2026)

Watched:  11/05/2026

Format:  AMC Imax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Takashi Yamazaki

So, readers of this here site will know I'm not just a Godzilla stan, I'm particularly an evangelist for Godzilla Minus One, that first film.  So, how did I feel about Godzilla Minus Zero (2026)?  Right?  That's what we're asking?  Maybe?

SPOILERS

First, I loved it.  I loved seeing my friends from the first film again, and seeing how they fair two years later, certainly.  But I'll argue - this is at least as much Mr. Noda's film this time around as our leads from the first movie.  We certainly spend time with Shikishima, Noriko and Akiko, but if the first film was Shikishima dealing with his guilt about the war, this is Mr. Noda dealing with his own as a maker of devices for killing.  

Second, I have known since picking up Jane's Addiction's Ritual de lo Habitual that sometimes you have such a firm idea in your head of a favorite band, the first listen to a new album rarely is where you land on the new album.  Sometimes you never cotton to it.  Other times, you decide "actually, this one is better".  But you rarely know that in the first 24 hours.  In my initial review of Minus One, I waffled on whether I was willing to say I liked Godzilla Minus One better than Shin Godzilla  (for the record, I do, but I also like both oranges and apples).  It's also possible I was so ready for this movie, I forgave it for flaws.  I definitely do that.  So whatever I write now will evolve over time.

Making a sequel to a phenomenal movie is always hard, but I do think, in general, the last 20 years have shown that filmmakers have studied enough good sequels to crack the code a bit and not just put out the same junk but with a new wrapper, which was kind of the default when I was a kid.  They know you need to go bigger and expand on the themes or there's no point, and Yamakazi as writer/ director certainly puts that notion into practice.

While both bigger and bolder, this may be one of the most seamless sequels I've ever seen.  Same writer/ director, same cast (to a shocking degree), a familiar look to the movie - it just feels like no one took a breath.  They just rolled right into this movie in a way you'll maybe feel recalls the original Star Wars trilogy; time has passed, but here are our beloved heroes again.

The movie doesn't hit with the same emotional weight as the first one.  And it kind of can't.  We had so much closure in the last film, we'd be undermining the meaning of that movie to simply reopen those wounds - but we certainly poke and prod at them.  Instead, Minus Zero instead makes broader calls to cross a line it didn't in the first film and directly discuss the inhumanity of the attacks at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  Those calls are deeply effective and maybe one of the best illustrations to a general American audience what it was on that day and what we did.*   Thematically, we're exploring how people have to live both what they did during the war that killed and injured people, as well as what it means to have survived unthinkable horror that included life-ending personal tragedy.  

Whether this was done because the film Oppenheimer has been seen widely and did *not* take the Japanese view into account, I can't say.  But as a Rated-R film that turns the tables and shows Americans, albeit briefly, what such an attack would look like on our soil, certainly provides clarity.  (Please do not enter the comments to relitigate Oppenheimer.  I'm begging you.)

It's only with many hours of separation I can ponder how insanely different this is than the goofy UFOs and princess-in-a-cap of Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster, the themes of which were...  friendship-by-monsters saves the day and we can ask the Faeries for help.  Also solid lessons.

All that said, Godzilla Minus Zero is much more of a traditional Godzilla movie than Godzilla Minus One.  Which makes sense - Gojira from 1954 gave way to...  lots of monster-on-monster violence.  Having Godzilla showing up again by himself would be just more-of-same and newly elaborate plans to do what we did before - and in less kid-oriented Godzilla movies (see: Godzilla v Biolante) the new monsters are a reflection of the themes of the human inner and outer conflict.

This time we are dealing with the appearance of a big, scary monster who appears (a baby Ghidorah), and things get properly Godzilla franchise.  Crazy technology appears, and Godzilla's appearance seems to have impacted some people giving them something like Godzilla-cancer.  But also, there's hints of psychic powers,** and maybe the earliest form of the JXSDF.

I can hear this picture

In short, what was more of a drama with the first movie that happened to be about a giant walking metaphor for trauma is more of a character-driven popcorn movie this go-round.  I won't say there aren't strong emotions - there are.  But they're more compartmentalized within the film instead of the circulatory system of the movie.  And that's in part to the fact we have split leads between Noda's crew and Shikishima's family.  

That said, I do feel like everything is *earned*, but in no way does this work as a stand-alone film - it's the next chapter from the last and if you aren't aware of what happened last movie (or it's been a while) you may be a tad lost why these people are having big feelings.

The challenge facing Shikishima and Noriko is that they've obtained an ideal life in the house we knew from the first film, but Noriko still wears the scars from the end of the first film.  But those scars are, in fact, a type of Godzilla cancer.  Meanwhile, Akiko is adorable.  

As a Ms. Shumiko stan, I am glad to report she's doing well and running an orphanage, which is 1000% on-brand.

Noda is running his FEMA-like org that has a mission to plan for any further Kaiju attacks.  

I promise, weather is important in this movie

The movie introduces a new character in Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), a foxy meteorologist who seems to have an almost psychic connection to storm prediction who did not speak truth to power/ Japanese government bureaucracy and it likely cost lives when a typhoon hit, and she was the only one to properly categorize the storm beforehand.  Now she's partnered with Mr. Noda and swiftly becomes a most trusted member of his disaster response team. 

We also meet Professor Murakami who witnessed the first Ghidorah attack and was present at Hiroshima where he lost his family.  By profession, he's a biologist and he's created a deus-ex-machina machine.

So, how's the monster action? 

Fucking bad-ass.

It has been since (checks notes) 2023 that I have been this viscerally jazzed in a movie.  What the FX team put together along with the maniacs in the sound department is just astonishing.  If I thought Godzilla Minus One nailed Godzilla action better than anything I'd previously seen, Minus Zero is real "hold my beer" territory.  

First, the CGI is somehow even better with this film.  There were a few places I thought Godzilla was too stiff in the first movie, and that is absolutely not an issue here.  What's remarkable is the management of size and mass, which I feel like Legendary has kind of tossed out the window in order to have fun scenes, this crew has made work in a way that really 

First, whomever decided what we needed was a dogfight between Ghidorah and Douglas A-1 Skyraiders gets my personal gratitude.  Brilliant stuff.  That was some of the best choreographed dogfighting I've seen in a movie in a couple of decades and makes me wish someone in the US could figure out some compelling dog fighting, because the last Star Wars films were flat.  

But, yeah, pretty much every shot of Godzilla, who is the secondary monster here (not a complaint, but a fact) is phenomenal.  Every frame is intended to remind you of the scale and power of the character, something that gets lost in the Monsterverse films.  Those movies posit our monsters are just titan pro-wrestlers (very Showa era), and Toho believes they are gods among us, and when they clash, we're going to be the collateral.  And the final fight is so good, I'd go see this movie again just for that even if the rest of the movie were garbage, which it isn't.

Look, there were moments during the monster scenes were I was as happy watching a movie as I've been in a while.  This is not all cinema is, certainly, but this is what movies do that *nothing else* can deliver, and it will simply not be this great at home on my TV.  

Monster battles feel good in a place like this.

There's a lot of new stuff in this movie with Noriko's seeming psychic connection with Godzilla, the meteorologist's maybe X-Men powers, Americans as an existential threat, mad scientists, etc...  and I was on board for all of it.  And I liked that it had the Empire Strikes Back ending.  Let's do a trilogy or more.  These are my movie friends just as Steve, Sam and Bucky are my movie friends, or Leia, Luke Han and Chewie.

I want to see where they can take this, and I have high hopes.  Toho is showing the original is still the best.

* I will not be delving into the moral, ethical, historical and other implications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Suffice to say, may we never see nuclear devices used again, and may Americans remind ourselves we have done terrible things.

**I yearn for a Miki re-appearance