[THREE STARS]
Ok, maybe it’s because the voice of panicked Brian Cranston brings me back to the recent heyday of Breaking Bad, but this new trailer Godzilla really did it for me. Sure, the paranoid voiceover was riddled with clichés, “God help us all,” but it was delivered by Brian Cranston—in a Godzilla movie!
This new trailer gives us more substance than the previous teaser and gives me a little more hope. For one thing, there’s a nice nod to Godzilla’s cinematic origin in the 1950s. Also, Godzilla is fucking huge, which (I can’t believe I’m saying this) is actually a big draw—a superficial draw yes, but a big one nonetheless. If you’re gonna do a giant monster movie, you have to out-giant all the other ones that came before. Hopefully that means one day there will be a movie about a monster the size of an ocean. That would be awesome. We’d all be dead so fast.
The soundtrack here is helpful too. Gyorgy Ligeti’s haunting contemporary classical music, most notably used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, has the unsettling effect of making you feel adrift in the presence of evil Gods. A good choice for this film.
And finally, there’s a moral to Godzilla, spoken by another character in voiceover: “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is within our control and not the other way around.” A good moral, such arrogant beasts we, man. If only we didn’t need Godzilla (or Jurassic Park or The Grey or anything by Werner Herzog) to teach us this lesson again and again. Alas…
Godzilla gets three stars. An improvement from my previous review. Well done, Godzilla. We await your total and unstoppable destruction.
Trailerbites 