Godzilla is coming back. We've known for a while that Monsters director Gareth Edwards was working on a reboot of the classic kaiju, but Legendary and Warner Bros surprised Hall H by presenting a reveal trailer for the film.
Set to a droning score and with the famous "I am become death" speech by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the trailer opens with scenes of devestation. But it's not just the buildings that are impacted; corpses lay littered around a destroyed train, and survivors crawl out of the decimated remains of crumbled buildings.
Then a slow pan around a mass... a mass with scales and clawed hands. Lots of clawed hands. It's a dead kaiju, crashed onto a home, with carrion birds flying by.
Cut to black and... the roar. The classic roar. The Godzilla roar. There's a cloud of dust and debris with an enormous thing within it. A claw emerges and clutches the whole roof of an apartment building. Then plates - the spiky plates that the real Godzilla has, huge things big enough for a falling I-beam to crack in half on them. And then the face is shown - more dinosaur than the original puppy dog snout, but recognizably Godzilla.
Director Gareth Edwards spoke a bit after the reveal, saying that the plan was to make a more 'realistic' Godzilla film, more in line with the original. Less scifi action, more 'What if a monster really walked out of the sea?' The dead bodies on display felt very much in line with Edwards' Monsters, a movie that was about the little people beneath the feet of the beasts, which is exciting.
Legendary is still a ways out from actually getting this movie going, but the teaser at least proves they're starting with the right idea: doing the Godzilla we love.
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