Home Entertainment GODZILLA roars to life at Comic Con

GODZILLA roars to life at Comic Con

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It’s not just cities being destroyed and superheroes dominating the headlines today! Okay, I’m half0lying, it mostly is just cities being destroyed. This time though, it’s not Superman’s fault, but instead that big ol’ Japanese icon, Gojirra. Or Godzilla to us damn outsiders.

The big, green nuclear-powered lizard of tomorrow made his presence known back at Comic Con 2012, and since then, director Gareth Edwards has been filming the snot out of that monster movie. Godzilla returned to Hall H this year, and with a few surprises behind his massive tail.

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Slashfilm had the following trailer description for the flick that was shown on the weekend:

We’re introduced to characters first off: Cranston seems to be an engineer/investigator of some sort — we see him in hazmat gear, and later running towards a crisis event in a government installation as the rest of the staff frantically runs away. Aaron Taylor Johnson is a soldier; Ken Watanabe is seen in a control room of some kind, and Olsen as mentioned above is shown in moments that suggest she’s been a victim of some disaster. A montage of various images shows a world in crisis and deploying military forces to fight some crisis moment.

And then there’s the kaiju attack. The first monster we see is a spindly-legged insectoid thing — is this Mothra? Didn’t quite look like it, but that’s possible. The monster is attacking an airport, and there’s a great wide shot that sees the kaiju destroying a plane, which leads to an explosion the camera follows by panning across a huge set of windows, looking out from inside the airport terminal. Part of the plane’s destroyed fuselage flies right to left across the screen, and is eventually stopped as it crashes into a giant foot.

That’s the intro for Godzilla, and the creature dwarfs the other kaiju. Few shots really show Godzilla, but the scale is very effectively communicated by the relationship between the insectoid monster and our favorite lizard. The overall effect could be described — and this isn’t a literal account of the footage, but an impression of its effect — like a slow pan up from the faces of the various human characters stuck in the middle of a monster-created mess, passing a smaller beast and finally trying to focus on the father of it all, Godzilla, hidden in fire and smoke.

There’s a reason why Godzilla is known as the king of the monsters, and that’s because there happen to be monsters, plural. What is that term technically? A Broderick of Monsters? That’s one of the big fail points of the original remake, besides the butt-ugly redesign, as Godzilla versus the US military felt like a cop-out at the time.

But if the big G is going to be tussling with more than just a few flimsy tanks, while remaining completely unstoppable in a manner that would make the Cloverfield abomination crap its pants, then I’m all for it. And with humanity caught in a monster party crossfire, this could be one of the more interesting summer flicks to arrive next year.

Last Updated: July 22, 2013

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