Godzilla Minus Zero (Toho Studios, Robot Communications, GKIDS, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, November 10) my husband Charles and I joined about eight other members of Bears San Diego for a showing at the AMC Mission Valley theatres of the 2026 film Godzilla Minus Zero. This turned out to be a direct sequel to the 2023 film Godzilla Minus One, made by the Japanese Toho company (which developed the character of Godzilla in the first place for a 1954 movie called Gojira which I’ve previously hailed as one of only two truly great giant-monster movies, the original 1933 King Kong being the other) once they recovered the rights to him from Legendary Entertainment, the U.S. company affiliated with Warner Bros. that had made a four-film sequence in the so-called “Monsterverse” that paired Godzilla with King Kong and various other giant-monster characters. I went into the theatre not knowing that this was a Japanese production or that the film was (except for a couple of brief scenes featuring American military characters speaking English) in Japanese with English subtitles. I give a lot of credit to the largely youthful audience for being willing to sit through a film with subtitles, though one critic noted that young people growing up in today’s Internet- and social-media-saturated world are used to reading text on their screens. What surprised me most about the film was that it may well be the grimmest Godzilla movie ever made since the 1954 original. It takes place in 1949, just four years after Japan’s defeat in World War II and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time the U.S. was still ruling Japan directly as an occupying power, under the direction of General Douglas MacArthur, which continued until the U.S. and Japan signed the Treaty of San Francisco on April 28, 1952.

As in the 1954 Gojira (the first Godzilla movie and still the best of the ones I’ve seen, far better than the brutally re-edited and largely re-shot version the U.S. got from American International two years later), Japan in this movie seems to be going through a nationwide post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from the loss of World War II and in particular the obliteration of much of their urban infrastructure first from the fire-bombing raids that had pounded Tokyo and other cities and then from the atomic attacks. The central characters are Kôichi Shikishima (Ryūnosuke Kamiki), a would-be kamikaze pilot whose suicide bombing raid was interrupted during the war by a mechanical problem with his plane; his wife, Noriko Ôishi (Minami Hamabe), who during the events of the 2023 Godzilla Minus One got contaminated with some of Godzilla’s DNA and therefore has a mysterious telepathic ability to communicate with him; their pre-pubescent daughter (the Wikipedia page on the film describes her as adopted but that wasn’t clear in the movie itself) Akiko (Sae Nagatani); and various scientists. Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) heads an agency called the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, which publicly pretends to be in the business of responding to natural disasters but is really in existence to ward off attacks on Japan by giant monsters. The coastal city of Matsumoto is attacked by a giant creature that looks a lot like Godzilla except that it can fly.

An embittered scientist named Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka), who lost a son at Hiroshima (the poor kid’s burned body becomes a recurring image during the film), and his assistant, Akira Hagiwara (Kô Maehara), work on the response to this new monster, depicted as an arrival from outer space. The scientists name it “Ghidorah” as a mash-up of the words for “chimera” and “hydra” (as the original Japanese name for Godzilla, Gojira, was a mash-up of “gorilla” and “whale,” which was what the creature was supposed to look like originally until director Ishirô Honda decided to make it a dinosaur instead). With the reluctant support of American authorities (there’s one rather bitter scene in which the insignia of a U.S. plane is painted out and replace with a red sun, the emblem of Japan’s air force, so the U.S. can maintain plausible deniability that their aircraft are being used to hunt down giant monsters), an aerial expedition against Ghidorah is undertaken. The fact that all the planes in this 1949-set film are still being moved by propellers instead of jets adds to the retro atmosphere of this movie. Shikishima’s two colleagues are killed in the attack against Ghidorah, but he successfully launches a new sort of fuel-air bomb intended to kill the monster. Only it has the opposite effect; instead of doing him in it transforms him into something even more lethal, complete with three heads and two tails as well as the ability to lift and destroy buildings with a gravity beam. The authorities eventually decide that the only way they can defeat Ghidorah is to revive Godzilla, who sank in the sea at the end of the 2023 film, and to do that they invent a device called a “resonance wave amplifier.” (The fact that the electronics of it are powered by vacuum tubes instead of transistors, which the U.S. invented but Japan most successfully exploited commercially, also adds a nice retro feel to this film’s tech.)

They test this contraption by turning it on and immediately causing a flock of nearby crows to fly into their building, a sequence that reminded Charles of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Unfortunately, they need Noriko Ôishi to operate this machine to revive Godzilla and turn it against Ghidorah, and this puts a strain on her already weakened (by its infection with Godzilla’s DNA) body. There’s an odd fantasy sequence in which the embittered Murakami envisions sending the revived Godzilla to the U.S. to destroy the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, which reminded me of the 1932 film Chandu the Magician and the similar sequence in which that film’s villain, Roxor (Bela Lugosi), fantasizes using his bizarre machines to destroy several world capitals, including Paris and London. Meteorologist Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa) has figured out where Ghidorah is likely to turn up next by examining the weather patterns around Japan. The scientists running the response effort select the Ginza neighborhood of Tokyo as the location where they want Godzilla and Ghidorah to have their big fight scene, since Godzilla already obliterated most of it in the 2023 film. The plan is to let the two monsters weaken each other and then kill the one that survived. They first attack Ghidorah with liquid nitrogen to make its body brittle and frozen, and then they drop a heat bomb on it, only instead of going on to kill Godzilla after they’ve finished off Ghidorah, the crew receives orders (from whom we’re not sure) to keep him alive after all in case he’s ever needed to ward off another giant-monster threat. In the finale Kôichi Shikishima and Noriko Ôishi decide they literally know too much to allow the government to let them remain at liberty. At first they threaten to leave their daughter Akiko behind with their next-door neighbor, orphanage operator Sumiko Ôta (Sakura Andō), but she’s all too aware that the other orphans were all told that by their parents, who were mostly killed in the war. At the end Shikishima and Ôishi let Akiko get on their motorcycle and flee with them.

I liked Godzilla Minus Zero a good deal better than I’d thought I would, mainly because it duplicated the sense of social pain better than any Godzilla movie I’ve seen since the 1954 Gojira. I’ve never seen the 2023 Godzilla Minus One but I’d like to (even though there are a lot of movies on my must-see list ahead of it). Another thing I like about this movie is the writer/director, Takashi Yamazaki, wisely kept Godzilla and Ghidorah off screen through much of the movie; though that made much of the plot exposition more ponderous than it might have been, it also had the Val Lewton-style effect of making the monsters more menacing precisely because they weren’t being pounded into our faces every minute. I was also impressed by the musical score by Naoki Satô, even though it was mixed awfully loudly in the manner of most modern movies aimed at the teen audience. I even liked the surround-sound effects (this was apparently the first Japanese film made in the IMAX format), even though some of those low-frequency rumbles seemed to go back to the late 1970’s and Universal’s “Sensurround” process. Still, I had a better time watching Godzilla Minus One than I was expecting!