Warning: Spoilers for Godzilla Minus One

In different ways, the King of the Monsters featured in Godzilla Minus One is both stronger and weaker than he ever was before. For Godzilla Minus One, Toho introduced a new version of the international pop culture icon, one that serves as a throwback to the 1954 Godzilla film that started it all. But while this new incarnation of the kaiju is more in line with traditional interpretations of Godzilla than the one seen in 2016’s Shin Godzilla, it still comes with some noteworthy differences.

In fact, Godzilla Minus One made several changes to Godzilla. Some of these even extend to his power level. Based on how he’s seen in the eyes of Godzilla Minus One’s human cast, it’s easy to regard this Godzilla as a true force to be reckoned with, like he’s meant to be. But while that’s not an incorrect assessment of his strength, it’s important to note that in spite of surpassing every version of Godzilla in one key area, he’s also inferior to them as well.

Godzilla Is Physically Weaker Than All His Toho Counterparts

Godzilla Is Easier To Hurt Than Other Versions

Though his menacing and forbidding visage may indicate otherwise, Minus One’s Godzilla is at the bottom of the chart when it comes to physical, raw power. Regardless of the era, audiences have grown to expect Godzilla to plow through military forces with ease, wrecking battleships, jets, and tanks with limited difficulty. However, that was not the experience that Minus One’s Godzilla had; he reeled back in pain when fired upon by a battleship and had his face disfigured by a mine detonation.

Godzilla is not known to be so easily wounded. In the 1960s and 1970s movies, for example, Godzilla was regularly attacked with missiles and other forms of weaponry. There was generally a sense that Godzilla found the humans’ efforts to defeat him more aggravating than genuinely painful. That’s in stark contrast to what happens in Godzilla Minus One, where the battleship’s missiles presented a clear and present threat to him, hence why he destroyed it so quickly.

The massive decrease in Godzilla’s physical strength is best exemplified by Godzilla Minus One’s ending. A bomb detonated in his bomb destroyed him from the inside. While the plan wasn’t treated as something simple or easy to pull off, it shouldn’t be forgotten that it was executed without the government’s help. In other movies where Godzilla loses to the humans, it takes much greater resources to pull off his defeat, with the most notable example of that being the invention of the Oxygen Destroyer weapon in the 1954 film.

Minus One’s Godzilla Has The Strongest Version Of Atomic Breath

Godzilla’s New Atomic Breath Is Like A Nuclear Bomb

Making up for his reduced durability and power in Godzilla Minus One is his atomic breath. When Godzilla unleashes it for the first time in the movie, it comes across as a tragic reminder of his roots, as it shares the functionality of an atomic bomb. All Toho versions of Godzilla employ a blast comprised of radioactive energy, but the atomic bomb connection has never been so overt. After all, Godzilla’s atomic breath doesn’t have a reputation for wiping out cities in a single use. It’s extremely potent, but considerably more concentrated.

Admittedly, Godzilla’s new atomic breath does come with a catch: it has to be recharged, meaning he’s extremely limited on how often he can use it in combat. That could be of great consequence to him if he misses – as evidenced by the finale of Godzilla Minus One – but the payoff will be significant if the blast connects. While Godzilla can kill other monsters with his atomic breath, several have been seen withstanding multiple blasts before finally falling. It’s hard to imagine a kaiju remaining standing if they take a hit from Godzilla’s atomic breath in Minus One.

With his new atomic breath, Godzilla would be in a position to defeat multiple monster opponents at once, which is a task that other iterations of Godzilla usually struggle with. This aspect of the ability naturally gives him a massive advantage, and one that could pave the way for Godzilla to pull off some fast, easy wins. But as noted above, the weakness that it has can be very detrimental to any winning strategy. Because he’s not as resistant to attacks as most versions Godzilla, whether he wins a fight could be entirely dependent on if his enemy dodges the atomic breath.