Godzilla Minus Zero

Godzilla Minus Zero is the sequel to Godzilla Minus One, the global word-of-mouth hit that just happened to be the first Godzilla movie ever to win an Oscar. In the movie, our heroes battle Godzilla and…a new nemesis. The Japanese film includes stunning visual effects, while also digging into themes of regret, shame, and the devastating aftermath of World War II. Need a few more disaster movies? Check out these episodes: In 'A Quiet Place: Day One', Lupita Nyong'o makes silence golden https://www.npr.org/2026/01/01/1198005231/in-a-quiet-place-day-one-lupita-nyongo-makes-silence-golden 'Twisters' has us spiraling https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/1197967704/twisters-has-us-spiraling 'Godzilla x Kong' and 'Godzilla Minus One' revamp the classic monster story https://www.npr.org/2024/03/29/1197963365/godzilla-x-kong-and-godzilla-minus-one-revamp-the-classic-monster-story Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  By the end of this movie, I was like bawling. I was like, people were next to me. I was like, you know, doing that embarrassed, like, huh, huh, I'm cool. I'm all right. I dropped my phone. I'm, you know, doing that whole thing. So yeah, it affected me greatly.

• 0:34Stephen Thompson?

  Godzilla minus one was a global word of mouth hit that just happened to be the first Godzilla movie ever to win an Oscar. Now, the newly acclaimed franchise returns with Godzilla minus zero, in which our heroes battle Godzilla and a new nemesis. I'm Stephen Thompson. Joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is Andrew Limbong. He's the host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast and a reporter for the Culture Desk. Hey, Andrew.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:01Stephen Thompson?

  It's great to have you. Also with us is Walter Chow. He's a writer, critic and film instructor at the University of Colorado. Hey, Walter.

• 1:09Speaker 03

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 1:11Stephen Thompson?

  It's great to have you. So the Japanese film Godzilla minus one is famous for its Oscar winning visual effects, but it's also widely admired for its willingness to dig into themes of regret, shame, survivor's guilt, and the devastating aftermath of World War II. That film and its sequel stars Yunosuke Kamiki as Koichi Shikishima, a skilled pilot who deserted his kamikaze mission near the end of the war. In that film, he redeems himself by defeating Godzilla, whose devastating attacks battered a Japan still reeling from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Godzilla minus zero picks up two years after the events of the first film and checks in with all of that movie's

• 1:55Stephen Thompson?

  major survivors. Shikishima has settled in with his newfound family, while others in his orbit have moved on to recovery and disaster prevention efforts. But he's pulled back into Godzilla duty in the aftermath of another city's unexpected destruction. Soon, everyone's banding together to bring down the latest monstrous threat and pausing, as in the first film, to reflect on their accumulated traumas. Like Godzilla minus one, Godzilla minus zero was written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, who also serves as the film's visual effects lead. It's in theaters now, and I'm here to tell you, as someone who just saw it on IMAX in a theater, this one gets very loud. Andrew Limbong, I'm going to start with you. What'd you think?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  You too? Yeah, it was so loud.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  I was like, I should have put like earplugs or something. I don't know. I had like a little headache.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  That aside, if I can be, get into earnestness for a second there. Godzilla minus one means a lot to me. It was like the first movie I saw as a dad. Like, I, it was the first night I was solo with my kid. You know, my wife was away and I put my kid to bed and I wanted to watch some like dumb monster movie that my wife had no interest in watching.

• 3:11Stephen Thompson?

  Right.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  And then I was like, why am I tearing up at this like Godzilla movie? Oh, man, this is a movie about fatherhood? And so I was hoping that this new one would keep some of that family energy alive. And I was a little worried because it's a very crowded movie. There's a lot going on. There's more monsters. There's more characters who get more stuff to do. But it does keep the, the family story intact. And straight up, by the end of this movie, I was like bawling.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I was like, people were next to me. I was like, you know, doing that embarrassed, like, huh, huh, I'm cool. I'm all right. I dropped my phone. I'm, you know, doing that whole thing. So yeah, it affected me greatly.

• 3:50Stephen Thompson?

  Okay. How about you, Walter?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  It affected me less, I would say. And I think part of it is just that the kid this time around is screeching at full IMAX volume for minutes at a time, like this unending air raid siren. And I get that we're really ramping up the emotion here, but having this little girl standing on top of a wooden slide, just screeching her little heart out, plus her heart, enough. And I think that really killed a lot of the emotionality for me because there was like a sequence where, where they were just standing there in the family and someone comes in and says, look at your parents' faces. Mark them, mark them. In the meantime, you know, it's like those scenes in movies where it's like, is this really the best time for

• 4:37Speaker 03

  a smooch? Because there's a monster walking right up to you here. And I was thinking, I was like, enough. Yeah, I'm an old grouchy man.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  I just want to go home and sit quietly in my basement. And

• 4:49Speaker 01

  That's so funny, because if I go home, that's what's waiting for me. And I'm like, we could just leave that at home. I'm in the movie theater. This is making me miss that.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  I've done my time, you know, I have two amazing, beautiful kids and they're way past, hopefully, the age of wailing like this. And so, but anyway, for the rest of the movie, the parts that were actually shot on IMAX, I think this is the first Japanese film shot on IMAX cameras, those sequences are genuinely spectacular. You know, there's aerial sequences, there's amazing looking things that are happening in this movie. And I was completely absorbed by that aspect of it. And then this real kind of commitment of developing the characters and developing the drama between them and developing all this stuff, I get it. First hour, though, is just kind of a rehash of the first movie in a way, and a reintroduction. Like, hey, aren't you so and so who did this and this during the great Godzilla thing, that and that?

• 5:41Speaker 03

  And every time someone new comes on the screen, like, reminder, reminder, reminder. It's like, well, why don't we not do that? You know, why don't we kind of begin on page 30 of your screenplay? I love the, the scale of it. I love some of the stuff about it. And at the end of the day, I just felt like, boy, I had enough of some of this. And it's maybe too maximal in every aspect, rather than just the monster aspect.

• 6:05Stephen Thompson?

  Yeah, I think I come down kind of right in between the two of you. I probably wasn't as overwhelmed by emotion as Andrew was, and I maybe not, wasn't quite as bored by the slow exhalations as Walter was. But I do think we're getting at kind of the blessing and the curse of these films. For those who are curious about this arm of the franchise, but have not actually dipped into these films, that's what you're going to get. You're going to get these big epic maximalist, extremely visually effective action scenes. But these movies take time and space to breathe. And if you are somebody who is easily bored, you can sometimes be like, all right, let's get a monster wrecking up the place. This is boring.

• 6:51Stephen Thompson?

  But at the same time, that is really setting the emotional stakes. One thing that I appreciate about these films is these films take time to reflect on the stakes and to grieve losses and to be deeply affected by things that have happened in the past. And that collective trauma, obviously, you know, in a movie set in Japan in the late 40s, makes all the sense in the world. You're going to spend time contending with the aftermath of the atomic bomb drops, contending with the aftermath of the war, contending with the aftermath of Godzilla's attacks from two years earlier. And these films spend a lot of time with grief, with

• 7:35Stephen Thompson?

  shame, with survivor's guilt. You know, the main character is a kamikaze pilot who bailed on his mission. And in the first film was dealing with the shame from that. I do appreciate the fact that these films sit in that emotion for a while.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  You know what's funny about that? I rewatched minus one. I was interested in how that movie framed, what are we going to call it? His lack of kamikazing as an act of cowardice, right? And it's something he sort of has to make up for and, and live up to improve himself as, as not a coward at the end of movie. But in this one, it's almost framed as the morally just and correct decision, right? His act of choosing survival over anything else is retroactively the right thing to do. And I wonder if that is an intention on the filmmaker's part about showing an almost difficulty with violence, right? In, in, in face of like what it costs. And that's what this movie is going for versus the other one.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I would say, I like slow movies, but there's a certain point, I think with, with this film where I felt like, none of the drama that they're trying to manufacture with the characters felt like drama. Felt like, you know, is, is the hero pilot Shikishima going to fly again? And that takes an hour of consideration and, and scowling and going back and forth.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Especially when you know the answer, right?

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Of course he's going to. What kind of movie is this? If he just sits on the side, of course he's going back. But he's got to get yelled at by other pilots. He's got to get guilted by, you know, and this, this entire string of things that lead up to this thing that we know is going to happen. But what was really effective, to your points, is that, yeah, we do actually care a lot about what's happened to Japan after this. And the real kind of ambiguous relationship that the Japanese have with, they're essentially their occupiers.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  After World War II, which is the Americans. And the Americans play kind of a minor role, but a major emotional role, if money are on screen time. And we don't see this very often in the United States, right? Of real resentment and, and horror that the Japanese must have felt towards the Americans for dropping, you know, atomic bomb over civilian population, two of them. And that's amazing. You know, that part of it is really extraordinary. It's really thoughtful. I wish that there was more focus on this aspect of it, rather than the sort of the daddy, don't go screech, you know? New York, with Manhattan, that is astonishing.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Incredible. Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 03

  Astonishing. You know, it was as unsettling to me as the apocalypse sequence from Terminator two.

• 10:15Stephen Thompson?

  Well, and I, and I think that scene is, as you say, extremely powerful. It is also, if that doesn't spark deep empathy, you know, I don't know what will. You know, if you were an American watching this film, you know, the devastation in Japan is very abstract to you. And you have a scene that lets you put yourself in, in their shoes if you are an American watching this film. And I think that's a very, very powerful thing to do.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:41Stephen Thompson?

  We've got more thoughts about Godzilla minus zero after the break.

• 10:47Speaker 00

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• 12:22Speaker 04

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• 12:30Stephen Thompson?

  Welcome back. Andrew, I'd like to go to you. What's on your mind?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Speaking of waiting a minute for things you know are gonna happen. It takes a second for Godzilla to tell up. This is very much, so this is very much the King Ghidorah movie, right? He is the first monster we see, right? He's the first fight. And there is a moment where I was like tapping my foot, being like, so, uh, when's, when's my guy? When's my guy showing up? Because he technically was, you know, quote-unquote, destroyed at the end of the last movie. And it's sort of a, a, what's the thing? Like Palpatine has returned. It's like, he just shows up and it's not clearly explained how he came back, but he's back. The interesting thing is about these Godzilla movies is that the first one always positions

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Godzilla as the monster that needs to be dealt with. And then the layer ones where he's facing off against other dudes, he turns into a hero figure, right? But he's still the same dude from the first movie, right? And, and I think something that this movie still hasn't solved yet, right, and was that I think other Godzilla sequels have to deal with is like, okay, what do we do about Godzilla? He's still gonna kill his own.

• 13:44Stephen Thompson?

  He's still a destructive force. I mean, I think what I like about this idea that like, okay, now we have these new monsters, now Godzilla is a hero fighting these other monsters, is that it is a metaphor for escalation.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:57Stephen Thompson?

  That it's a metaphor for like, okay, we've devised an even greater weapon to fight this even greater evil, but you're kind of unleashing more and more and more destruction. So it feels very much like a metaphor for war. It feels like a metaphor for kind of human conflict in general. And obviously, they're giant monsters. You're not gonna settle this with diplomacy. But I did feel this, this, you get this kind of, if you're like rooting for a resolution where these cities are not getting destroyed and people are not getting killed in great number, you know, you're rooting for this to be solved, you're rooting for it to be fixed, but there's a helpless feeling sometimes where it's like, okay, the solution to this problem is to unleash yet more destruction in the hope that that fixes everything.

• 14:40Stephen Thompson?

  And that felt like a metaphor for world events. It felt like a metaphor for war and conflict in general.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  We talk about Godzilla, it kind of reminds me of the cult question about Michael Myers in the Halloween movies, like, what is this thing that never is killed? I mean, you can chew him up in a thresher and he comes back in the next one, good as new. And, but I think Godzilla, very similarly, emerges from the ocean after World War II in Japan, bearing the scars, the nuclear radiation scars of survivors of our attack. And it becomes this thing in Japan where they say, this is us, this is our trauma, and it recurs and it escalates and there's more and more. And eventually, there must be a comeuppance. So I think in the United States after 9/11, our Kaiju are Marvel superheroes, right? You know, they're made out of radiation and they come and they destroy our cities and they level things. And eventually, like with Marvel, like with whatever, Godzilla with Destroy All Monsters,

• 15:32Speaker 03

  the greatest Godzilla movie of all time, you know, has to reckon with all of the Kaiju, has to say, you know, where do we put this now, our aggression? At what point do we stop escalation? So really, to your really cogent point, I mean, I think this is a Godzilla movie. These last two movies are really addressing this world immediately post-war, which, you know, we haven't solved anything with World War II. We've just begun a Cold War. We've begun antagonism with the Soviets, which is mentioned in the film.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  So, you know, to your point, Stephen, when you're talking about other monster movies that don't do this, the American Godzilla movies don't do this. They don't take any time with the human stuff. And the human stuff is really embarrassing and hackneyed.

• 16:11Stephen Thompson?

  Oh, so bad.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  And you can level Rio de Janeiro with no human casualties that, that we're gonna talk about. This does exactly the opposite. So it is, even as I was having trouble sitting through it, I recognize the importance of doing it. You know, you, you have to have this sort of human context, or else you just have two big things beating each other with no, no point. I mean, they'll never die, they'll never whatever. They just kind of bite and chew and blast. And then the next movie, there's more of them.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  That's it. This movie does do the monster wrestling stuff really well. Like this. There's a point, I'm cheering, I'm hooting, there's some like biting and chewing and blasting that is so sick and so satisfying in this movie when it goes off. Yeah.

• 16:55Stephen Thompson?

  This is an R-rated movie. Like, not many of these action movies where buildings are getting knocked down and stuff. Most of them are PG-13 and you get, including the first of these films is PG-13. And you get this kind of bloodless violence where the PG-13-iness of it all kind of creates this remove. And this film removes that remove. It is R-rated. And a couple of these scenes, there's a particularly upsetting kind of flashback scene where it's like, no, we're gonna do this R-rated, we don't care if this gets an R-rating. Like, this stuff is scary, this stuff is hard, this stuff has repercussions. And as somebody who has seen a lot of these movies, I really appreciated that. And as Andrew said, the action scenes are pretty freaking great.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  You know, I, I really love that when Godzilla uses his nuclear power, you know, his, his big giant nuclear buildup power that, that was introduced in the first one. I love when he uses that, that it hurts him. You see him lying there and on fire and injured, really. And it takes, you know, a while for his mutant healing ability to kick in and stuff. But, you know, I appreciate this idea, and I think it's throughout this movie, right? Where it's like, you're only hurting yourself, you guys. You know, when we're using weapons of mass destruction, we're doing all this stuff, you know, that flashback sequence you're talking about, set in a hospital corridor immediately after the first film's Godzilla attacks, where people are just trying to grab at doctors and begging for help and everything.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  There's really some great intensity there where we see the toll of a city falling down. You know, there's so much good stuff. I don't want to feel like, you know, I'm the guy that didn't like this movie. I did like a lot of it, quite a lot. And I think that those moments are so effective and so alien to American audiences in a way, especially in our blockbusters, sort of immune to this. We've killed our empathy for what happens when we knock down buildings and we knock down cities and we destroy people's lives. We've become numb to that. And I think there's maybe even something insidious about our, our media apparatus making us accepting of those images. And here's a movie that is not accepting of those images. In the biggest movie that you can imagine, you're having this real kind of plea for empathy,

• 19:05Speaker 03

  for please, guys, this is fun and everything, and it seems amazing to drop bombs on cities, but there are people in those cities. And those people are maybe just like you are. And that's, there's value to that.

• 19:18Stephen Thompson?

  Absolutely. I just want to say, when we're talking about the visual effects in this film, people are gonna talk about the extremely effective, you know, like buildings getting knocked down and these monsters battling it out. To me, my favorite thing about the visual effects in this film, it's the monsters' cute little faces. They have these cute, very expressive, slightly mischievous little faces. And I just think that's, I think that's so clever. Like Godzilla has like a little glint in his eye.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see that.

• 19:50Stephen Thompson?

  And to me, that is part of the joy and part of what made me appreciate this second film on a gigantic IMAX screen.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why I thought that we were gonna have, you know, like in that last Spider-Man movie where like he calms the Hulk down by just like talking to him gently or something like that? Because you kind of get to see Godzilla's face and you get to see him sort of personified. I thought we were gonna get a moment of like, a key character in this movie being like, hey Godzilla, we love you, da-da-da-da-da. But we don't get that. He just like does his thing and blasts away, which for better for worse. I was like, okay, cool, he's just still like doing his thing.

• 20:26Stephen Thompson?

  I mean, ultimately, if you're, if the message you want to send is de-escalation, that's the way to do it. Hey, buddy.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  True, yeah. Hey, it's really sorry. Can I shout out the score really quick? The score in this movie is so tremendous. Like Ghidorah gets his own sort of, I guess we've got like a late motif or whatever, this like riff that comes up every now and then. And it is genuinely frightening and, and it's, and it's horrifying. And then when like the Godzilla music kicks in, the pro wrestling aspect of it all, like you get that feeling.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. I, I thought the score was just massively done. And I'm looking for an OST, you know, as we speak.

• 21:24Stephen Thompson?

  Yeah, I, I recommend this film. I really, really, really enjoyed it and admired it and love the direction that this franchise has been taking after frankly, a few pretty dismal Godzilla movies.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:37Stephen Thompson?

  Well, that brings us to the end of our show. Andrew Limbong, Walter Chow, thanks so much for being here.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 21:44Stephen Thompson?

  This episode was produced by J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, and Mike Katzif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson, and we will see you all next time.

• 22:04Speaker 00

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