Godzilla Featurettes Will Help You Decide What Kind Of Ticket To Buy
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As of tonight, Godzilla is in the middle of stomping through cities in what is essentially his triumphant un-retirement world tour. Many of you probably lined up tonight to see the King of the Monsters wreak havoc on the unsuspecting human population, and we hope you enjoy yourself, we certainly did (read our review HERE, and later this weekend we’re going to have a tag team discussion full of all kinds of spoiler-y goodness). For those of you who are still on the fence, or wondering what kind of ticket to buy, here are two new featurettes that just might help you decide.
The Godzilla reboot is big, huge, massive, and probably some other words that mean very large. You would think IMAX would be the perfect format to view the movie in, and it very well might be. You shouldn’t take my word for it, I’m hardly any kind of expert in technical matters, but if you need some convincing, you should listen to director Gareth Edwards talk about watching his own movie projected on a movie screen that is stories high. He knew exactly what to expect going in, and it still surprised the shit out of him. If you can startle yourself with your own work, that’s when you know that you’re doing something right.
With all of the trailer and clips and posters and behind the scenes glimpses of Godzilla, and there have been a great many over the course of building up to this movie, you may think you have a good idea of what is in store for you, but you really don’t. This extended international featurette doesn’t expose much that hasn’t been unveiled already, but it kind of combines everything that has come before and ups the ante.
There’s a ton of footage here that you haven’t seen unless you’ve watched the actual film, and between that and the cast and crew interviews, you dig into just about every facet of the movie. This starts off talking about the Godzilla’s legacy. He’s one of those rare commodities that, even if you have never seen a Godzilla movie in your life, you know who and what he is. That’s how large a shadow this iconic creature casts across the global landscape of popular culture.
From there you examine the origins of the beast. Appearing a mere nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he initially served as a cautionary tale about the potential unknown hazards of atomic energy. Beyond that, he was a symbol of man’s constant attempts to surpass and suppress nature, and the arrogance of that stance.
You round things out with plot details and a few little nuggets about the human characters in the film, and a discussion of Edwards’ desire and attempts to make this all feel as realistic as possible. And given that this is a movie about a 350-foot-tall primordial lizard, he pulls that off remarkably well. This portion of the feature talks about how he went about making this feel concrete and authentic, the tricks and techniques he used to ground the film, all while still showing you a computer generated monster flatten major urban centers.
Godzilla stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Watanabe, David Strathairn, Juliette Binoche, and Sally Hawkins, and is playing everywhere now. You should call in sick tomorrow and go see it.
