Godzilla Comic-Con Footage Revealed, And It Is Awesome
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UPDATE: It’s back up again. Watch it while you can!
Godzilla stands revealed, people! Or at least he will until the video gets pulled again, hopefully after you fine people have had a chance to watch it. Yes, the Godzilla teaser footage screened at Comic-Con this past summer has found its way online, and it is pretty damn sweet. In case the embed above is already dead by the time you’re reading this, we’ll include a couple of screencaps from the trailer as a consolation prize.
While we loved Pacific Rim and thought it threw the gauntlet down when it came to giant monster action, it’s been clear from the get-go that Godzilla was going to be a different beast. The surest sign of that was the hiring of director Gareth Edwards (Monsters). He’s said from the beginning that he wanted his take on the classic movie monster to be a very realistic vision of what a rampage by giant creatures might look like unfolding in our average, generally monster-free world.
That tone is readily apparent in this first-look footage. Over footage of massive destruction and carnage, we hear the voice of Manhattan Project leader Robert Oppenheimer delivering his unforgettable “He have become death” speech, originally spoken about the atomic bomb and its catastrophic nature.
We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
It’s a great bit of footage that inspires every confidence in me that Edwards and company will do right by Godzilla. They are clearly taking this seriously, as evidenced by that shot above of the destroyed train surrounded by corpses. You never really saw the human cost of the battling Jaegers and Kaiju in Pacific Rim, but that’s because it was going for a very different thing than Godzilla. Edwards’ film seems to have every potential to succeed in all the ways Roland Emmerich’s godawful 1998 Godzilla flick failed.
And that final reveal, accompanied by the iconic roar…goosebumps.
It’s also worth noting that the footage does indeed seem to confirm that the movie will feature multiple different monsters, as you can see the fallen form of at least one of them in the still below.
Godzilla will trample theaters on May 16, 2014. The cast includes Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kick-Ass), Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), and Walter White himself, Bryan Cranston.
