In recent years, genre films have developed a real exposition problem. Whereas in decades past, filmmakers would simply give audiences a high-concept hook and trust them to come along for the subsequently unfolding story based upon that inciting incident, the characters at the center of it all, and the themes at play, such is no longer the case for many genre films. Instead, we get movies that frequently screech their momentum to a halt in favor of attempting to over-explain things to the audience that didn’t need explaining in the first place.
A contributing factor to all of this is undoubtedly the ways in which culture has evolved around films in the past few decades. As online outlets and social media platforms gained prominence, it became incredibly popular (and lucrative) to try to find “plot holes” in well-performing films and point out how such inconsistencies apparently ruined the films. Obviously, none of that was actually true, but it has and continues to color the lens through which some viewers see these kinds of films. But fortunately, Godzilla Minus Zero says f--k all of that, and steadfastly refuses to cater to such tendencies.
An easy way to gain a better understanding of the hows and whys of all of this as it pertains to Godzilla Minus Zero is to use Ghidorah as an example. The film literally opens with Ghidorah already on Earth, plowing through an entire city. A bit later in the film, there’s a scene in which the central characters and the audience are clued into the fact that Ghidorah arrived on the planet inside of a meteor a few days before the events of the opening scene and began assimilating lifeforms around it, resulting in the dragon-esque creature it now is.
And that’s all you get. Why did Ghidorah land on Earth, specifically? Where does this lifeform come from? None of that actually matters to the story of Godzilla Minus Zero, and so writer-director Takashi Yamazaki doesn’t bother to engage with it. A lesser film might’ve felt the need to explain all of this away through flashbacks and extensive dialogue, all in the hopes that some nerd on the internet won’t later complain about it being a bit narratively convenient that another monster landed on Earth two years after Godzilla emerged.
Speaking of the titular monster, midway through the film, despite being blown to literal bits at the end of Godzilla Minus One, Godzilla shows back up in the middle of the ocean. How exactly did this happen? The movie plants a few different ideas throughout its runtime for viewers to mull over, but they’re all very much within the subtext of the movie. The narrative proper devotes literally zero time to explaining this, and it's all the better for it.
We as an audience know this Godzilla has regenerative powers, and we all knew on some level that his defeat at the end of Minus One wasn’t permanent. If he had simply shown up in the opening scene of this new film, that would be one thing, but Minus Zero makes you feel his absence throughout its first half, so his return feels emotionally earned.
Any such explanation for things like this would be convoluted nonsense anyway, which makes it all a lose-lose situation. Instead, Godzilla Minus Zero makes the astute decision to chug ahead and simply accept that you as an audience are either going to get onboard before the Kaiju-sized train leaves the station, or you’re not, and I think that rules.
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