Two years can be enough time to begin treating a street as ordinary again. In Godzilla Minus Zero, that is a valuable measure of what Yamazaki has to destroy. The film returns to Shikishima and Noriko in 1949, with the habits of a family beginning to take hold after the events of Minus One. There is a welcome specificity in the choice to return so soon. The people have had time to make plans and have every reason to remember how quickly a plan can cease to apply. The monster’s return puts pressure on a peace the characters have barely had a chance to practice.
Ryunosuke Kamiki has the difficult sequel task of preserving Shikishima’s history without simply restoring his earlier despair. There are different stakes to living through an attack once somebody expects you to come home. Minami Hamabe’s Noriko gives those expectations a human scale. The film is most involving when their relationship has a life before another emergency makes it useful to the plot. Yamazaki can let a modest piece of reassurance carry the knowledge that the people offering it have previously been very wrong about the future.
The return to 1949 gives the sets and clothing a slightly different task from the first film. There has been time for people to claim more of a room for their own use, or for a street to resume business. Those marks of settlement make a spectacle of destruction legible at a scale below the buildings themselves. The strongest period images allow such details to register briefly before anything arrives to disturb them. The destruction is more alarming for having something specific to interrupt, even if the audience barely had time to see what the people in the street intended to do next.
King Ghidorah creates a new problem of scale. It is one thing to present a creature that dwarfs a building. A second creature can make it harder to decide where human sight belongs in the encounter. Yamazaki’s strongest effects preserve that question by giving the spectator a position from which the monsters can still overwhelm the image. When a giant shape is partially lost to dust or ruined architecture, the eye is placed back among the people for whom missing a part of the action would be a condition of survival. That choice does more for the terror than an immaculate view of both adversaries.
Professor Murakami brings an alternate way of organizing the fear. The more time people have to put observations together, the more room there is for an interpretation to become a course of action with a price of its own. Min Tanaka gives the proceedings an arresting gravity. The balance grows harder to keep as the sequel adds explanations and prepares larger collisions. There is value in watching people make a collective decision on incomplete knowledge. When the film hurries them toward a set piece, the deliberation can feel like a briefing the monsters are waiting for them to finish.
Murakami’s visions add a disquiet that a second monster alone could hardly supply. There is an interval in which an image can feel very authoritative to the person receiving it and be of uncertain use to everybody else. Yamazaki can shift into a different kind of spectacle there, giving fear an image without immediately finding a room in which it can be discussed. That makes the return to the deliberations of the ensemble more interesting. The people who have to act can never make the picture they have of the danger quite as complete as the film can make ours.
The melees have less of the shock that Yamazaki can create when a single figure enters a location with a clear sense of ordinary use. The second antagonist creates striking shapes and a credible new threat. It also makes prolonged spectacle available to a film whose finest achievement is a different kind of proximity. We can believe in the life going on at street level because the production has spent time establishing who would be on a street and why. The picture is frightening when the effects disturb those arrangements, even if very little of a creature fits in the frame.
The eventual attention to Ginza is useful for a related reason. A named district gives a confrontation an address with an ordinary meaning before the plot makes it a staging ground. The sound and scale of Godzilla have a force here that can disappear when a movie treats the clash as something taking place on neutral terrain. Yamazaki sometimes keeps the people present by making the setting do that work. Elsewhere the staging calls on the audience to keep more of the larger maneuver in its head and leaves less attention for what the people below it are able to see.
Yamazaki retains an uncommon sense of what recovery costs a person who was there for the original disaster. That interest is large enough to survive the noisier turns. The return to postwar Tokyo is worth more than a chance to reprise a successful monster. It lets the sequel consider what it is like to have begun investing in a future and to find out how visible the investment makes you when the ground moves again.
