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Of all the criticisms leveled at Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” (apart from the one I have: that the entire movie is a frigging mess), the most resonant, to me, was the complaint that Nolan had made a mistake by
leaving the Greek gods out of the story. He certainly demonstrated that you could make a version of Homer minus the gods; he didn’t necessarily show that it could be done without losing a crucial dimension. Besides, if you can’t see gods at a movie of “The Odyssey,” where are you going to see them?
The answer is: at a Japanese monster movie — more thrilling, by leagues, than “The Odyssey” — where the monsters possess an ominous majesty that’s not of this world, even as they’re in the middle of laying waste to it.
In “Godzilla Minus Zero,” which premiered tonight at the New York Film Festival (it opens Nov. 6), there are two oversize mystic beasts: Godzilla, the original kaiju (the character is now 72 years old, proving that 72 is the new awesome), and King Ghidorah, the dragon hydra who made his first appearance in the 1964 kaiju classic “Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster.” Each is a formidable creature, though in both cases it’s more than a matter of epic stomp or gargantuan wing power. When Godzilla tilts his head up to the sky, gathers his might, and then shoots out a blast of radioactivity that can level a city, it’s an exhibition of transcendent force. And Ghidorah’s heads — which look, up close, like costume figures out of a Golden Dragon Dance — emit orange lightning volts that extend for half a mile. These aren’t mere monsters. They’re serious movie gods.
“Godzilla Minus Zero” is set in 1949, and it opens with a startling sequence in which Ghidorah, with only one head (this will change), shows up in the city of Matsumoto and destroys it. We’re given a grand vista of demolition, and also close-ups of Ghidorah seen from the point-of-view of Professor Murakami (Min Tanaka), a Hiroshima survivor who’s been doing biological creature research. Godzilla will soon turn up as well, even though he was thought to have been destroyed at the end of “Godzilla Minus One.” (It’s hard to destroy a god.) To save Japan, Kenji Noda (Hidetake Yoshioka), the high-strung, pencil-necked, Einstein-haired director of the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, leads his team in devising a plan that’s got a sandbox-showdown ingenuity: They will lure both creatures to a single locale and goad them into fighting each other. Whichever one remains standing will be wounded and weakened, and the human forces can then finish that monster off.
When you go to see a big visual-effects movie, like something from Marvel, the closing credits that roll on for 12 minutes will feature multiple armies of visual-effects teams (each digital company with its own general). I have no doubt that a formidable army worked on “Godzilla Minus Zero.” But it’s also a movie that features the highly unusual credit “VFX, written, and directed by Takashi Yamazaki.” That’s a sign of how much the movie’s visual effects emanate directly from the imagination of the filmmaker. He’s writing, he’s directing, and he’s orchestrating spectacular gargantuan action paintings of beasts in motion. He’s an artist of larger-than-life pop horror.
We’ve seen countless monster duels in kaiju movies (old and new, good and bad, Japanese and American), but Yamazaki, who rebooted the genre and took it to a new peak in the revelatory 2023 retro kaiju classic “Godzilla Minus One,” works with a quality that none of the filmmakers of recent decades has summoned: a fairy-tale innocence, an immersion in the annihilating heavy-metal poetry of Godzilla — the way the destruction of a city can become a spectacle out of a dream (which is to say, a national nightmare). In “Godzilla Minus Zero,” when Godzilla and King Ghidorah go at it, it’s more than a WWE match of primeval rivals. It’s a clash of the titans that will reduce everyone in the audience to a wide-eyed, jaw-dropped child.
“Godzilla Minus One” was justly celebrated for its human story, which felt like something out of a Kurosawa movie of the ’50s. In “Godzilla Minus Zero,” Yamazaki follows through on that, continuing the tale of Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), the former World War II kamikaze pilot; Noriko (Minamo Hamabe), who is now his wife; and Akiko (Sae Nagatani), their adopted daughter, who has grown into a verbally precocious seven-year-old. The fate of this family is at the heart of the film’s emotional palette. To battle the creatures, Kōichi will go back into fighter-pilot mode, but the services of Noriko will be called on as well. She’s one of the survivors of Godzilla’s 1947 attack who now has bits of Godzilla DNA embedded in her body (which is why she wears an eyepatch).
For a long time, kaiju movies were a semi-joke — a fusion of the colossal and the cheesy, and the fact that you couldn’t separate the two was part of what gave the genre its unique shlock magic. But Yamazaki transcends all that. His staging draws on our collective nostalgic memory of kaiju grandeur, and it also dignifies the genre by building it on a drama that’s staged with passion and vigor. When did anyone ever talk about performances in a Godzilla movie? But in “Godzilla Minus Zero,” one responds to the high anxiety of Yoshioka’s Noda, and to the magnetic intelligence of Masami Nagasawa as Makoto Aoyama, a meteorologist whose intuition about storms has a hint of the prophetic. Min Tanaka, who plays the professor, is an actor who was born on March 10, 1945, the day of the firebombing of Tokyo (the deadliest air raid in human history), and his courtly but simmering presence powerfully channels the film’s awareness of history. Yamazaki stages a couple of audacious sequences that feel, in their way, like his answer to “Oppenheimer.” One is a fantasy of Godzilla approaching Manhattan the way he once approached Tokyo, a chilling vision for any American to behold.
At first, when the Japanese officials think that they’re contending only with Ghidorah, the film’s battles have a tactical stateliness. Ghidorah heads off to the mountains and hibernates, curling up like a giant snake, which makes them think they can bomb him into oblivion, using planes and weapons borrowed from the U.S. But all that accomplishes is to wake the sleeping giant. The sequence in which a half dozen planes battle Ghidorah in the air is grand, eye-popping filmmaking. And that’s just the appetizer, as Godzilla’s return heralds a battle of staggering vastness.
In the final section, a plot strand or two gets a bit tangled. The professor has a hidden agenda, and how he ever meant to carry it out remains too abstract to be entirely clear. Yet as key characters are put under fire, we realize how much we’ve come to care about these creature battlers. They’re rooted in a time and place that feels all too real, and this allows the monsters to parade their primitive might in a way that means something. It was a stroke of inspiration on Yamazaki’s part to reset the kaiju genre in the late ’40s, during the Atomic Age where it is spiritually rooted (the original “Gojira” was released in 1954). The creators of the new James Bond series would do well to follow suit. (That’s how Bond could be vital again.) “Godzilla Minus Zero” is destined to connect with a huge international audience, and it’s already clear that this won’t be the last of Yamazaki’s kaiju epics. That’s because the movie proves that when you do it right, what seemed old can become timeless.
