The Hollywood Reporter's early review calls Takashi Yamazaki's kaiju sequel a bigger, more emotionally loaded follow-up ahead of its November theatrical run.
Godzilla is back from the ocean depths, and this time he's not the only monster in the frame. The Hollywood Reporter's review out of the film's New York Film Festival premiere confirms what fans had already guessed from the trailers: Godzilla Minus Zero brings in King Ghidorah, the three-headed dragon first introduced to the franchise back in 1964.
Director Takashi Yamazaki, who won an Oscar for the visual effects on 2023's Godzilla Minus One, sets this follow-up two years after that film, in 1949. Japan is trying to limp back to something like normal life. Godzilla himself is presumed dead, exiled to deep water after the events of the first film. Then Ghidorah shows up with wings that generate hurricane winds and tears apart an entire town in the opening stretch, according to the review.
The reviewer notes that Yamazaki mostly ignores the tangled sci-fi backstory the franchise has built around Ghidorah over decades — the alien-controlled meteorite origin, the time-travel plots, all of it. Here the dragon is simply another apex predator, wired for a turf war with Godzilla, complete with its own energy weapon: gravity beams that wrap force fields around buildings and trains before smashing them back down.
The human story picks up where Minus One left off too. Former kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima, played again by Ryunosuke Kamiki, is living with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and the orphaned Akiko (Sae Nagatani) as a found family, with Sakura Ando's Sumiko helping raise the child. Once Ghidorah starts wrecking things, Hidetaka Yoshioka's Noda, now running the government's disaster response, pulls his old team back together and adds two new faces, a weather forecaster played by Masami Nagasawa and a professor played by Min Tanaka who lost family in Hiroshima and, the review hints, might be hiding something.
There's a wrinkle specific to this film too. According to the review, Jun Kunimura plays a doctor studying what exposure to Godzilla's cellular tissue did to survivors of the earlier attack on Ginza, and Noriko's own wounds have apparently been healing at a rate nobody can explain. That thread, plus Koichi's push to get back in a cockpit against Noda's wishes, is where the review says the film puts its emotional weight, alongside the aerial monster fights Ghidorah's arrival now demands.
The Hollywood Reporter frames the sequel as staying true to what made Minus One work, treating the 1949 setting and Japan's uneasy relationship with America and its own war guilt as more than backdrop, while still delivering the scale a Ghidorah fight requires.
GKIDS has the US theatrical release dated for November 6. Whatever's driving the online chatter about a rating change for the franchise hasn't been addressed in the reporting so far, and there's no confirmation from Toho or GKIDS on that front yet. What is confirmed: after Minus One's Oscar run, expectations for this one are already high, and Yamazaki now has to land a Ghidorah fight without losing the human story that made the first film work.
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