WARNING: Contains spoilers for Godzilla Minus Zero
Well, there it is. The cat’s out of the bag – or, the giant, three-headed gold-skinned space-dragon: King Ghidorah is the villain of Godzilla Minus Zero. Not that his presence is a total surprise. The trailers for Takashi Yamazaki’s much-anticipated Godzilla Minus One sequel didn’t explicitly reveal Ghidorah – perhaps the greatest rival to Godzilla in Toho’s kaiju kick-off pantheon – but there were more than enough clues to tip fans off: those yellow lightning beams, that trilling cry, the gravity beam powers. Now it’s official; Minus Zero is a royal rumble blockbuster, as Ghidorah emerges to wreak havoc in post-war Japan, eventually clashing with Godzilla.
For Yamazaki, it was the most obvious way to raise the stakes in his sequel. “Everything was pointing towards King Ghidorah,” he tells Empire. While his biggest cinematic inspirations for Minus Zero are James Cameron’s mega-sequels – Aliens and Terminator 2 – there’s also a parallel with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. “Think about the Batman franchise – if your first film was successful, what’s the natural villain you’ll select for the sequel? It’s the Joker,” he notes. “It seems like the obvious choice.” Who is Godzilla’s ‘Joker’ if not King Ghidorah?
While Ghidorah holds high stature in the wider Godzilla mythos, his inclusion here was also a choice close to Yamazaki’s heart. “I really, really love Ghidorah for my personal reasons,” he says. “I was born in 1964, and that was incidentally the first time Ghidorah appeared on the silver screen, so I feel there’s a connection there. And in that film [Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster], Ghidorah flies over a town called Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture, which is also my hometown.” During early development on Minus Zero, Yamazaki pitched the studio with his idea for the character. “We approached Toho and said, ‘Hey, I think we want to use Ghidorah for our opposing kaiju’,” he explains. “I was relieved to hear that they were open to the idea, and our film was greenlit.”
I really, really love Ghidorah for my personal reasons.
Yamazaki presents a very specific take on Ghidorah. The character has always had extra-terrestrial origins, but he enters Minus Zero as a shape-shifting space organism, crash-landed on a Japanese mountainside as an amorphous blob. Upon ingesting a bat, a raven and a deer – providing the initial DNA make-up for its first form – it emerges from its cocoon with wings, horns and talons. And when humanity intervenes, they accidentally lightning-charge Ghidorah into its ‘King’ form, tripling its headcount, and rendering it super-sized and super-scaly. Reinventing the legendary character was an opportunity too good for Yamazaki to pass up. “There are amazing interpretations and designs of King Ghidorah over the years, and this ability to add our own interpretation into this lineup… as a kaiju fan, there’s no higher honour than that,” he beams.
In previous Godzilla brawls, the arrival of another antagonistic creature has inevitably made the big lizard more of a heroic presence. But Yamazaki was careful to make sure Godzilla is “not an ally to humans” in Minus Zero’s Godzilla v. Ghidorah face-off – especially since Godzilla is lured into the fight by human intervention. “In the Minus One and Minus Zero universe, there is really no interaction, or no consideration for, mankind [from Godzilla],” he says, point out that Godzilla is “basically dragged to this ruin by mankind, and then Ghidorah was there. So, naturally, [his] basic instinct is, ‘I need to fight’.” It’s a move which says more about humanity than it does about Godzilla’s allegiances. “If anything, it really shows human ambition and arrogance,” explains Yamazaki. “[Godzilla is] this almost godlike creature, that mankind in a way manipulated and took advantage of.”
The wild success of Godzilla Minus One brought Yamazaki and crew to the Oscars, with Godzilla action figures in hand, where he and his team won the Best Visual Effects prize. It remains to be seen if Minus Zero could result in a return trip to the Academy Awards in 2027. “I’ll have to carry two [figures],” Yamazaki chuckles of potential future awards carpets. “Godzilla in one hand and Ghidorah in the other.” Let them fight!
Godzilla Minus Zero is out now in cinemas in the UK, US, Japan and elsewhere