Godzilla: Three Questions We Asked Ourselves After Repeatedly Watching The Trailer

You've got monsters, we've got questions.

By Brent McKnight | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

GodzillaAdmittedly, this is like the third piece we’ve written about the latest Godzilla trailer, but in our defense, it is epic as all hell, and we can’t stop watching it on repeat. In addition to simply being awesome and getting us all amped up to watch a giant lizard stomp through urban settings, there’s also a lot here to talk about. In the wake of all of these viewings, a few questions occurred to me, and here they are.

Just how big is Godzilla?

One aspect of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 stab at a Godzilla movie that vexed audiences is the vacillating size of the creature who keeps trying to eat Matthew Broderick. Sometimes he’s big enough to topple buildings, while others he’s small enough to hide around a corner unseen or hang out in a subway tunnel. That makes no sense. While it’s obvious that Gareth Edward’s incarnation is going to be fucking massive, the question remains, just how big is this bastard going to be? And more than that, we’re looking for consistency, for him to be the same size throughout.

One thing this trailer gives us in abundance is destruction. It’s obvious that whatever caused this ruckus is freaking enormous, and when we finally see the King of the Monsters, either screaming like madman or swimming through the ocean, we get an idea of his size. You don’t toss around ships by being just a little big, you’re huge and you have a great deal of power behind that breaststroke of yours. If the last poster we saw is to scale—I know, I know, I’m basing this off a poster—then Godzilla towers over the skyline of San Francisco. And there are times in this trailer where he reasonably should be that large.

Here’s where I start to worry. There’s that moment where stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Taylor-Johnson stop to gape at something in the distance and we cut from their shocked faces to a shot of a tails slipping behind a building. That’s eerily reminiscent of Godzilla 1998, when the monster just kind of wandered off and got lost in New York. Given that he may dwarf the tallest buildings in town, he shouldn’t be able to hide like that. Unless he dives deep into the ocean, you shouldn’t, for a moment, lose track of him. If nothing else, you’d be able to hear and feel the devastation he leaves in his wake. Hopefully that’s just a perspective issue, or a moment manufactured for this trailer, but it evokes bad memories we’re all trying to get past.


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