Is Godzilla Minus Zero a Kid-Friendly Kaiju Movie?

Not unless they’re ready to discuss the ethics of the A-bomb.

Godzilla is big at my daughter’s preschool right now. The other day, I wore a T-shirt with Hedorah on it to pick her up, only for a little girl who’d just started at the school to run up and say “Hey! I know that kaiju. It’s a bad guy from Godzilla!” Considering the Smog Monster is a relatively deep cut, I was impressed — but she’s in good company. The King of the Monsters is popular, and not just with my daughter and her friends. (The response to the Hello Kitty x Godzilla toys at McDonald’s certainly suggests a much broader appeal.) I have been a Godzilla fan since I was just a little bit older than my daughter is now, so of course I am thrilled that she loves kaiju. I’m even more thrilled that there’s basically a new Godzilla movie every year lately between the American Monsterverse and the Japanese ones.

But what type of Godzilla movie is this newest one, Godzilla Minus Zero? The franchise started with the first Godzilla in 1954, a horror movie that used the monster as a metaphor for the bombs that had hit Japan less than a decade earlier. I could talk at length about the importance of the symbolism in these more-serious Godzilla films (I’ve talked at length about this with the director of Godzilla Minus One, in fact), but I readily admit that most of the nearly 40 movies in this franchise are, first and foremost, dumb fun. Whether it’s the cheesy ’70s movies that smashed two dudes in rubber suits together or the expensive yet still very silly Monsterverse movies like Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla is inherently fun for kids. How could it not be? It’s full of memorable monsters and (literally) oversize action that appeals to anybody who has ever built a block tower just so they could knock it down. So you’d be forgiven for planning to let your kids see Godzilla Minus Zero, even though it’s the first movie in the franchise to be rated R. The movie it’s a sequel to, the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, was a more dramatic movie than most Godzilla flicks, but other than being a talky kaiju-free postwar drama for about an hour, it didn’t do anything too extreme for younger viewers. Surely Godzilla Minus Zero will be the same, right?

The Verdict

No! Godzilla Minus Zero is the least kid-friendly Godzilla movie ever made, and I say that as someone who has seen the eldritch horror and dry conference-room-based humor of Shin Godzilla. I wasn’t planning on taking my own Godzilla-loving almost-5-year-old to see the movie anyways, because she can’t read subtitles nor can she speak Japanese, but having seen Minus Zero, I’m not sure at what age I’d want her to see it.

Minus Zero isn’t just rated R because the kaiju-on-kaiju action is gnarly, though it is. (King Ghidorah really does a number on the big guy, and at one point Godzilla rips off his nearly severed arm to whack Ghidorah with it before regenerating a new limb. It’s sick.) The fight scene rules, and there are much, much worse things for kids to see than CGI monsters grievously injuring one another. Where Minus Zero earns its rating, and sets itself apart from almost every other Godzilla movie, is the violence it shows being inflicted on human beings. Typically, humans in kaiju movies are just assumed collateral damage; there are people in buildings that are getting smashed, sure, but we’re seeing the destruction from afar rather than watching individual people inside die. Minus Zero never lets the audience forget the human cost of this monstrous spectacle, and that cost often includes children. A mother mourns her dead child in a makeshift hospital in the aftermath of Ghidorah’s attack; we see another mother and her baby cry in terror before they plummet to their deaths while the protagonist helplessly watches; and in a scene that admittedly might be more traumatic for parents than it is for children, the protagonist’s adorable daughter cries and screams because she’s about to be separated from her parents forever. There’s non-kaiju human death, too, including a flashback to the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing in which a bloodied grandfather discovers the charred remains of his daughter and grandson.

The human death in Minus Zero isn’t necessarily gory, and the visuals alone aren’t traumatizing (with the exception of one scene that I’ll detail in a little bit). Instead, their context within the movie is simply much, much heavier and intense than the average kaiju fan might be expecting. It’s a tremendously bold and effective choice on writer-director Takashi Yamazaki’s behalf, one that cements Minus Zero as one of the more gripping and grounded movies in the Godzilla canon— even as the title character’s fighting a three-headed dragon from outer space. It also means younger Godzilla fans hoping for an exciting monster romp might emerge more than a little shell-shocked.

The Caveat

What if your kid is looking for more than an exciting monster romp, though? Godzilla Minus Zero is one of the best Godzilla movies in part because there’s so much more going on than just the kick-ass Godzilla-versus-Ghidorah fight. The unflinching depiction of the human toll of the kaiju carnage heightens the stakes, but it’s used to address larger themes as well. The horrors of the atomic bomb, America’s culpability and relation to postwar Japan, and the morality of revenge are major themes in Minus Zero. If you have an older kid who can handle seeing some fellow kids in peril and is perhaps interested in a post-film discussion about the ethics of the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Godzilla Minus Zero might be the kaiju film for them. Come for the giant-size monster action; stay for a teachable moment about history and trauma.

There is, I suppose, another type of kid who could see Minus Zero without a problem: a kid who just goes in and lets everything that’s not fighting monsters go totally over their head. Children who are old enough to not be scared of the monsters but not quite mature enough to understand the implications of the movie’s heavier aspects could theoretically hoot and holler their way through the action-packed climax, but they’d be doing the movie and themselves a disservice. Parents should instead show them any of the dozens of less-intense Godzilla movies they could fully enjoy on a purely popcorn level.

The One Scene You Should Consider

There’s one scene in Godzilla Minus Zero that takes its depiction of human death and suffering to an extreme while also showing just how far it’s going with its themes. A new character, Professor Kanji Murakami, has been brought into the fold to help find a way to combat Ghidorah. He’s created a device that can lure Godzilla to a specific destination, so the plan is to direct Godzilla to Ghidorah’s location and let them fight. However, he has an ulterior motive. He’s the man whose daughter and grandson died in the bombing of Hiroshima, and he’s haunted by their memory and nearly mad in his desire for revenge. He imagines using his device to lure Godzilla to New York City, and after decapitating the Statue of Liberty, the monster unleashes his atomic breath on Manhattan. As the explosions from the blast expand, average New Yorkers of all ages look up in horror — and we watch in horrifying slow motion — as the skin peels off their screaming, surprised faces. It’s basically what some people criticized Oppenheimer for not showing, only here it’s Americans perishing in nuclear flames, and the weapon is a monster rather than a bomb. It’s a deeply upsetting scene because of the visuals, but it’s also upsetting because you can’t help but see where Professor Murakami was coming from. We saw the mutilated remains of his family in the wreckage of Hiroshima earlier; Godzilla is just the next logical, terrible step in this cycle of violence.

If you think your child can handle close-up atomic death and the subsequent thoughts it provokes, strap in. If not, this franchise has been around for three-quarters of a century. You’ve got other options. 

An Alternate Route

If you want giant-monster-versus-giant-monster spectacle, it’s hard to beat Godzilla vs. Kong, a movie that, for my money, delivers on the promise of its title better than any other motion picture ever made. My daughter and I recently watched half of Godzilla vs. Kong and half of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire on cable in a hotel room, and she absolutely dug it. GvK is the superior film; GxK is so stupid it’s almost hard to believe it’s part of the same franchise as Minus Zero, but that’s part of what makes Godzilla so great. The next Monsterverse movie, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, comes out next year and it’s probably gonna be big, loud, and dumb as hell, so even if your kaiju-loving kiddo isn’t ready for Minus Zero, there’s going to be another theatrical Godzilla pretty soon.

Or if you want to let your child see the more serious side of Godzilla but not necessarily watch a human face sizzle off in slow-motion, the original 1954 film is a masterpiece. The dubbed American edit, titled Godzilla: King of the Monsters, adds Raymond Burr to the plot as a western audience surrogate, and although this version makes some detrimental changes to the original Japanese film, it’s a pretty good entry point for American audiences, especially younger ones.