Shortly after they'd both won Academy Awards at the 2024 Oscars, Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki got a chance to speak with Christopher Nolan when Oppenheimer premiered in Japan. "As part of our conversation I told him, 'One day I think I would like to make a response to your movie,'" Yamazaki recalls. "In my mind I was thinking I'd develop a film that looks directly at Hiroshima. But then I began thinking, 'Wait—Godzilla is itself a metaphor for nuclear war. Maybe I can combine the two and make a Godzilla movie that is also an answer to Oppenheimer.'"

It wasn't a crazy idea; the King of the Monsters has indeed been a walking, building-smashing allegory for the atomic bomb ever since the very first film in 1954. But audiences may be shocked by the degree to which Godzilla Minus Zero, the follow-up to 2023’s Minus One, is a full-throated response to Oppenheimer.…