Godzilla Is Nature’s Equalizer In This New TV Spot
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Godzilla is now less than a month away and we’re seeing TV spots, posters, and all manner of promotional material drop almost daily at this point, sometimes even more frequently than that. We wouldn’t want to stop talking about director Gareth Edwards’ upcoming reboot, you might forget about it after all, so today’s installment of Godzilla-related news comes with a fantastic commercial with some impressive new footage, and an interview where Edwards shares some of his hopes for the film.
The early portion of this video focus on the character side of the film, showing what they’ve lost and what they have to lose. Bryan Cranston’s Joe Brody loses his wife, Juliette Binoche, in what appears to be an accident at a nuclear facility. So he has that going on. Joe’s son, Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and his wife, Elle (Elizabeth Olsen), have each other, as well as a young child. When a giant lizard comes calling, you start to consider the possibility that all of this can be ripped away from you in a matter of moments.
All of this is well and good, if you can have a massive creature feature and manage to ground it with characters and a solid story, that’s a bonus all around. But even with all of that, the highlight of this clip is what comes at the end, in the form of a fantastic shot of the King of the Monsters himself towering over the skyline, roaring his little head off. It’s exactly what we want to see. As Ken Watanabe’s character says, “Nature has an order, a power to restore balance.” And Godzilla is one hell of an equalizing force.
When many people think of Godzilla, the first thing that springs to mind is the campiness, a guy in a rubber suit kicking through obviously cardboard buildings, and things like that. What they forget, however, is just how serious the 1954 original was. Traumatic events like Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh wounds in Japan, and atomic power was an unknown, something the public didn’t particularly understand, and thus feared. As Edwards notes in this interview, Godzilla encapsulated this paranoia and was an allegory for these painful memories.
You have to love when he says that the whole goal behind his Godzilla was to capture that same sense of importance and gravity, to make a movie that does more than just provide a spectacle. It’s refreshing to hear someone say, “I love to take science fiction seriously,” and talk about avoiding the modern hazard of falling into a CGI hole. Edwards wants to create tension and suspense, which is something that, if you’ve seen his previous film, 2010’s Monsters, you know he can do well.
Godzilla opens everywhere May 16, but you can buy your advanced tickets starting on Monday, April 21.
