How do you get to Alice Tully Hall? Well, if you’re Gorjira aka Godzilla, they just invite you. The latest installment in the beloved kaiju franchise, Godzilla Minus Zero, had its world premiere at the home of the New York Film Festival on Saturday night as part of the event’s 64th edition. A direct sequel to the Oscar-winning 2023 blockbuster, Godzilla Minus One, the new film stomped its way into the sold-out auditorium in a screening that was regularly interrupted by cheers and applause.
Once again directed by VFX artist, Takashi Yamazaki, Godzilla Minus Zero adds a new monster to the mix — the three-headed dragon King Ghidorah — but still plays on the same thematic elements involving post-World War II Japan’s political and societal landscape that drove the previous installment, not to mention the 1954 original. Speaking after the screening, the director also acknowledged that he had contemporary events on the brain, though he declined to name them specifically.
“Godzilla is a franchise that’s always a reflection of our own current events, and is almost a lens through which we can see our present day,” Yamazaki said through an interpreter. “While I was making Godzilla Minus Zero I did feel that, despite it being set 80 years in the past, that there was some kind of juxtaposition to the present day.”
According to Yamazaki, executives at the legendary Japanese movie studio Toho — which owns the franchise — started talking to him about sequelizing Godzilla Minus One before the earlier film was even released. “The first conversation happened when we finished Godzilla Minus One, and the day we completed it, we had a screening and they said, ‘Hey, how about a sequel?'” the director recalled. “I was very nervous because Godzilla Minus One was intended to end there; I thought it had a pretty clean ending and I tied up all the loose ends.”
The sequel discussion became more urgent when Godzilla Minus One enjoyed a super-sized opening day in the title character’s native Japan and went on to play in packed theaters around the world on its way to becoming the highest-grossing franchise installment in history. And thanks to its Jaws-inspired aquatic action set-pieces — which employed the “hide the kaiju” strategy as effectively as Steven Spielberg’s once hid the shark — it also became the first Godzilla picture to enter the Oscar conversation. (Not for nothing, but Spielberg professed his admiration for Godzilla Minus One, as did another action maestro, James Cameron.)
Nominated for Best Visual Effects at the 2024 Oscar ceremony, Godzilla Minus Zero was pitted against four FX-heavy movies from American studios, including Gareth Edwards’s The Creator, James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Tom Cruise’s seventh Mission: Impossible movie, and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. But not even Rocket Raccoon proved a match for the King of the Monsters as GMZ entered the Oscar record books as the first Japanese film to triumph in that category. And with a reported $10 to $15 million budget, it’s also one of the least-expensive movies to take home the VFX prize.
While Godzilla Minus Zero still wasn’t made for Marvel Studios-level money, the sequel does boast a higher budget, which is fully on display in the extended action set-pieces, including the rock ’em sock ’em climax pitting the two kaiju against each other. But Yamazaki also wanted to ensure that the story never lost sight of the human family at its center, the Shikishima clan that consists of ex-kamikaze pilot Kōichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), his wife Noriko (Minami Hamabe), and their adopted daughter, Akiko (Sae Nagatani).
“In Godzilla Minus One, Kōichi’s main character arc centers around his guild and question of ‘Is it okay for me to be alive when all my peers aren’t?'” observed Kamiki. “And towards the end, he finally committed to this idea of, ‘I do want to live.’ And in the sequel, he grows as a character, because now he has a family… and there’s additional weight that he’s carrying on his shoulders. It was refreshing to see him shed that guilt and have a more human side.”
As for the choice of King Ghidorah as the film’s new antagonist, the director says that was rooted in his own childhood love for the dragon, who made his first onscreen appearance in a self-titled 1964 creature feature. “They were doing a screening of that film in my hometown… and I was so excited that I would see my own hometown in a film,” the director recalled. “But in that original version, Gidorah just flies over the town and that’s it!” Needless to say, he causes a lot more damage in Godzilla Minus Zero.
Buoyed by the success of Godzilla Minus One and the rabid anticipation for the sequel, Toho and GKids is planning an aggressive U.S. release strategy. As teased at CinemaCon earlier this year, Godzilla Minus Zero is coming to conquer Imax screens and multiplexes on Nov. 6, allowing domestic viewers to finally get to see what that Statue of Liberty cameo is all about.
Chatting with other pundits at the post-premiere party, the general sentiment is that GMZ is a more-than-worthy sequel that delivers crowd-pleasing action and a heart-tugging finale, but lacks a novel hook that could propel it into the major Oscar races. Still, it is the early front-runner to repeat as this year’s Best VFX winner courtesy of Yamazaki’s deftly-directed set-pieces, which provide a thrilling sense of scale for its two scaly fighters.
In order to retain his crown, though, the giant lizard will have to take on some giant sandworms; Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three lands on Dec. 18, and the two previous installments won that particular Oscar category at 2022 and 2025 ceremonies, respectively. Other likely nominees include the Marvel movies Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday, as well as Christopher Nolan’s brawny epic, The Odyssey.
Godzilla vs. the Cyclops? That’s a fight we’d watch with both eyes wide open.
