It’s been a year marked by some excellent cinema, but I don’t think anything has come close to this brilliant sequel when it comes to delivering popcorn thrills. Godzilla Minus Zero is a ton of noisy, chaotic and immense fun.

Reclaiming Godzilla for its native Japan after an ill-starred 20 years during which it stomped Hollywood backlots and SFX studios, 2023’s Godzilla Minus One rebooted the franchise superbly with a story set among the ruins of post-war Tokyo and collected an Oscar for its visual effects.

That film saw Godzilla destroyed and sent in pieces to the bottom of Sagami Bay. Set just a few years later, in 1949, Minus Zero brings Godzilla back – crankier and clumsier than ever – to do battle with its kaiju nemesis, Ghidorah, a dragon-like monster threatening to wreck everything the fast-reconstructing Japan has achieved.

Can the guilt-stricken hero of the first film, failed kamikaze pilot Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), be persuaded to go into battle one more time?

Can Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a former mine-sweeping expert from Minus One who now heads Japan’s Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau, come up with a plan to defeat not one but two apparently invincible monsters?

Godzilla Minus Zero. Image supplied

Granted, it’s not much of a plot, but Minus Zero’s human-scale drama (centred on Kōichi’s cobbled-together family), playful humour and director Takashi Yamazaki’s seismic-scale visual effects more than compensate.

Godzilla’s reappearance, accompanied by the hair-raising bass trombone blasts of Akira Ifukube’s classic theme (quoted liberally in Naoki Sato’s Minus Zero score), had me cheering from my seat.

The film’s retro look is hugely appealing (Godzilla retains all the lumbering qualities that marked its screen debut back in 1954, when it was played by an actor in a rubber suit), the historic cityscapes are impressive (all the more so when being destroyed) and the set-piece battles nothing less than majestic.

Too often in action cinema, we feel pummelled into submission by the visual effects sequences in fantasy movies. In Minus Zero, we’re left sated, elated and ready for another helping – which, one suspects, is already on its way.

Godzilla Minus Zero screens nationally from 5 November.

135 mins

Action/drama

Rated M