“Godzilla Minus Zero” premieres in New York as a sequel to “Godzilla Minus One”

This direct sequel to the 2023 global sensation picks up in 1949, as a makeshift family finds its domestic harmony again threatened by a rampaging creature’s path of destruction.

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.

The director of Godzilla Minus One doubles down with his follow-up film in the best ways possible. Read Polygon's review of Godzilla Minus Zero.

Godzilla squares off against King Ghidorah in an IMAX-sized melodrama that features some of the most thrilling kaiju fights ever.

New York film festival: The follow-up to 2023’s Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One dazzles with smart social commentary and jaw-dropping effectsEven 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.) Continue reading...

Godzilla is back and better than ever as Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus Zero” is earning rave first reactions after its New York Film Festival press screening. The director’s sequel to 2023’s blockbuster “Godzilla Minus One” wowed journalists with epic thrills and the first R-rated action set pieces in the long-running kaiju franchise. First reactions out […]