Posted in: Movies | Tagged: bryan cranston, film, gareth edwards, godzilla, san diego comic con

I Saw The Godzilla Trailer At Comic-Con And Want To Tell You About It

Patrick Dane writes for Bleeding Cool.

If you have been following Bleeding Cool's films coverage over for the last week or two, you will have seen a little narrative playing out, all leading up to me seeing the Godzilla trailer.

I'm a huge fan of old Godzilla movies and everything I had seen and heard over the last year or so suggested that Gareth Edwards was making the right choices with his adaptation.

And now that I have seen the trailer, I can say that this tough-sell old fan is very satisfied.

During the Comic-Con panel,  Edwards said that he wanted his Godzilla movie to be shot like an independent film, with a clear emphasis on characters and their stories. For once, that wasn't just director guff like we often hear being spun around at events like this.

Now, while I don't have a shot-for-shot break down for you, I can at least help you understand the tone of the trailer.

For most of the trailer there was actually no surface indication that this was actually a Godzilla movie. We saw a series of shots showing soldiers running around and jumping out of planes, Bryan Cranston rooting around in rubble, fire, destruction, big emotion, pain etc.

Make no mistake – from what I saw, this feels like a character-driven disaster movie. It was clearly less about putting a spotlight on the King of Monsters and more about focusing on the human costs of a rather huge lizard trouncing around the world.

However, what we did see of the big guy was very interesting. While I  had a rather obscured look at his face already, in the Godzilla Experience, this trailer was all about showing off his size.

Towards the end of the trailer, we saw the military having at a rather large Kaiju. Looking something like a mix between Mothra and the Cloverfield monster, the beast had scale and a clear force of monstrous presence that the military were struggling with.

So cue the entrance of Godzilla who absolutely dwarfed this other monster. It hardly came up to his shin. This was a cleaver bait and switch that showed off the frankly absurd size of Godzilla.

Some people might be a bit upset that this isn't just shaping up to be a dumb fun actioner about a big ol' lizard destroying stuff. But those people? Well, I don't know what to say about them.

1954's Gojira was a shockingly haunting exploration of destruction, made in a country who had seen far too much. Godzilla movies only became a muddled and cartoonish franchise once the focus started to fall on Big G exclusively.

Godzilla has worked best when not a character but as a walking tall metaphor. While it's too early to say how far Edwards has gone for that approach, at the very least, Godzilla clearly doesn't look like a protagonist here, more a force of nature, something that happens to our main characters.

A character driven story with Godzilla in it is just what I was looking for. I hope everybody else loves what Edwards is doing too.

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