Godzilla Minus Zero unleashes a hurricane of grief and fury

Of the mighty forces clashing in writer and director Takashi Yamazaki’s truly epic sequel Godzilla Minus Zero – be they Kaiju or simmering post-world war two American-Japanese relations – composer Naoki Satô’s orchestral hurricane hits hardest.

At the other end of the scale from the tuba’s bone-gnawing depth in John Williams’ iconic Jaws theme, Satô’s overwhelming swirl of piercingly high-pitched strings seems to tear at the fabric of the screen, as well as our nerves. The splintering shriek, both beautiful and brutal, announces the arrival of another giant beastie descending on the beleaguered Japanese archipelago.

Brace for impact, because (not yet King) Ghidorah has landed.

Enter the Ghidorah

First appearing in Ishirō Honda’s 1964 feature Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, the fifth outing from Toho Films’ original Shōwa era run, the hydra-like dragon from outer space is inspired by the mythological creature Yamata no Orochi.

Only Godzilla’s arch-nemesis, Ghidorah, looks a little different this time round. He only has one exceedingly angry face, rather than the traditional trio, and the same number of tails, instead of the expected two.

Granted, he’s just a baby, as we later discern from black-and-white footage recorded by Japan’s newly formed Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau. It reveals Ghidorah’s silvery, shimmering chrysalis, discovered in a meteor crater, with Ghidorah already capable of devouring anything nearby with the lash of a tentacled whip.

But first, we witness a newly emerged Ghidorah laying waste to Matsumoto City – in a devastating echo of Godzilla tearing through Tokyo’s Ginza district in both Godzilla Minus One and the original, way back in 1954.

Possessed of a similar scale as the Big G, Ghidorah likewise is in possession of an alarming arsenal. A triple threat, he spits golden lightning bolts comparable to Godzilla’s atomic bad breath, deploys a big blue wave of gravity-defying energy that can raise entire buildings into the sky only to dash them down to earth again, and his chaos energy summons storms like it’s the end times.

For the little guys way down there in Ghidorah’s looming shadow, it pretty much is.

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Found family threatened

Godzilla Minus One weighted its monster mash in very human drama. Set in 1947, it saw the citizens of Tokyo, still scarred by her razing during Operation Meetinghouse, and shellshocked following the inexcusable horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And then Godzilla appeared to retraumatise her populace, not least because, in a cruel twist of fate, the Kaiju was reawakened from a deep-sea slumber, both enlarged and energised by the same apocalyptic weapon unleashed again by the US, further testing the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

Power nap done, Godzilla’s fury swept the steadily rebuilding Tokyo aside again. Reluctant kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and his fellow pilots were recruited by boffin Dr Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) to fight back in a seemingly futile defence. We also invest in Shikishima’s found family, falling for survivor Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe), with the new couple taking in orphaned infant Akiko (Sae Nagatani).

Against all the odds, Kōichi managed to turn Godzilla’s wrath inwards, crashing his plane into the maw of the beast and ejecting with moments to spare just as the heat ray was supercharging, ripping the Kaiju apart.

But as anyone invested in these towering tyrants knows, they are also blessed with remarkable regeneration abilities, so it’s safe to say that Godzilla Minus Zero does not field Ghidorah solo. Nope. Godzilla is (bright blue glowing) back, baby.

Weather with you

The key players are in place to hold back Armageddon as best they can again, with Noda now in charge of the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau. He recruits a still fly-shy Shikishima as a consultant, also employing meteorologist Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa). Her knowledge of weather fronts and their application while on a war footing echoes the Andrew Scott-led Pressure.

Also on board is Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka), another scientist whose outlook is starkly different from Noda’s paternal concern. A Hiroshima survivor who lost his family in the most horrific circumstances, he’s wracked with grief and fury.

Yamazaki achieves more in under a minute’s flashback in excoriating this great evil unleashed in the name of ‘peace’, yet still terrorising our world today, than Christopher Nolan does in the three-hour Oppenheimer.

Akiko cries at the prospect of becoming an orphan twice over, as Shikishima is again inexorably drawn to the Kaiju assault, as is Noriko, still nursing her wounds from Godzilla’s rampage, yet realising her close shave has irrevocably changed her nature. She may yet prove an invaluable weapon in the Ghidorah fight-back, as the US sits on its hands, allowing their sometime enemy, Japan, to deal with the mess they created.

From Tokyo to New York

That opening sequence is sublime, as is Ghidorah’s inevitable power-up, crushing Matsumoto Castle underfoot after the failure of a truly ingenious first strike against the astro monster (again attempting to harness its own fire). Sometimes, when faced with imminent doom under the claw of a gargantuan behemoth, you stand back and leave the battle to the big boys.

Hence their desperate scheme to not only attract the attention of a newly reanimated Godzilla but also somehow direct his might not against the Ginza Wako building – on the frontline since 1954 – and its neighbours, but at his space-faring rival.

The visual effects, supervised by Yamazaki and Kiyoko Shibuya, are once again monumental, with a particularly chilling New York-set sequence astonishingly grim.

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Production designer Anri Jōjô’s period set-building, much like the human drama, grounds us in a believable hysteria, with cinematographer Kôzô Shibasaki lingering on faces frozen in unimaginable panic.

If the final showdown feels a tad rushed, it’s nevertheless undeniably ferocious – yer boy Godzilla’s gonna be smarting for a while. While the increasingly naff American iterations lack any sense of gruesome grandeur, Godzilla Minus Zero is the sort of breathtaking spectacle cinema was made for.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Yamazaki’s team take home another Oscar. I’d be overjoyed if it’s for Satô’s orchestral thunder and Ghidorah’s lightning, caught in a bottle. It burns as bright in my mind’s ear as these titans’ city-smashing blasts.

Godzilla Minus Zero is in cinemas from 5 November.

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