What’s Up With That New York Attack Sequence in Godzilla Minus Zero?
Sadly, Godzilla didn’t take New York.
Much hay has been made about Takashi Yamazaki’s comments that Godzilla Minus Zero, his spectacular sequel to his acclaimed 2023 film Godzilla Minus One, was his direct response to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. This is not a huge surprise, considering Godzilla was always a metaphor for the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — a metaphor that Godzilla Minus One turned literal.
“Godzilla Minus Zero takes a more direct approach in terms of looking at Godzilla's existence, so to speak,” Yamazaki tells Inverse. “I would say past films were, perhaps in terms of the themes Godzilla represents, more tangential in how it explored and how it expressed those themes on the screen. But in our case, I would say even when Godzilla fires its breath, how it looks very much like a mushroom cloud and a direct metaphor to nuclear warheads, this is true for Godzilla Minus One as well.”
In Yamazaki’s Minus films, Godzilla is a direct consequence of the atomic bomb, rising out of the ashes of postwar Japan to continue to wreak devastation. “What we've done is a much more direct visual expression, a direct experience to the events that happened in the past,” Yamazaki says. “And it was not something we could sort of dance around. It was important we took it head on.”
But Minus Zero takes that metaphor a step further, in ways that expand on the iconic kaiju’s lore, while taking the films’ postwar story in fascinating new directions.
Warning! Spoilers for Godzilla Minus Zero ahead.
Godzilla in New York?
Professor Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka) is revealed to be a survivor of Hiroshima.
Partway through Godzilla Minus Zero, it’s revealed that Professor Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka) survived the Hiroshima bombing, though his family did not. Wracked with grief, Professor Murakami swears vengeance against the Americans — and Godzilla proves instrumental in his plan.
Professor Murakami joins the Large-Scale Disaster Response Bureau’s campaign to defeat Ghidorah after he also survives the kaiju’s attack on Matsumoto City. Using his knowledge as a biologist, Professor Murakami invents the “Resonance Wave” device, which can lure in creatures by imitating their specific frequencies. This device proves instrumental in department chief Kenji Noda’s (Hidetaka Yoshioka) plan to pit Godzilla against Ghidorah, using Noriko’s (Minami Hamabe) unique connection to Godzilla through her G-Cell mutation. But before they enact their plan, Professor Murakami imagines a very different use of the Resonance Wave and Noriki’s G-Cells.
In a sequence that was teased in several of Godzilla Minus Zero’s trailers, Godzilla somehow appears in New York City. We see mundane scenes of people walking through the streets, playing with their children, enjoying their days...before Godzilla unleashes his atomic breath. In a disturbing scene that echoes one particular scene in Oppenheimer (when Oppenheimer imagines his cheering audience melting away in a radioactive blast), the residents of New York melt away in the atomic blast. But...it turns out to all be a dream of Professor Murakami, who is soon dissuaded from his plan for vengeance by Noda. We never get to see Murakami go through with this plan, and Godzilla never makes it to New York. However, it was important for Yamazaki to retain this sequence.
“That particular sequence is really this sort of imagination of a single character with quite an extreme ideology, shall we say,” Yamazaki says. “But I think for that character, it was very important to see exactly what he was seeing.”
Professor Murakami shows his Resonance Wave device.
He continues, “If you pose the question, well, what's on the other side of Godzilla's breath, then that's what it is. And I think in the past films, even my own past film, we never really see exactly what happens on the other end, on the receiving end of Godzilla's breath, but this is in one form an answer to that and I think is very important for that character.”
So, could we ever see Godzilla used as a weapon in this way? If not by Professor Murakami, then perhaps by the U.S. military who, by the end of Godzilla Minus Zero have captured him with the intent of using his research for their own purposes. Which does not bode well for, well, the rest of the world.
