Trailer Analysis: Godzilla
Godzilla has been known as the God of all monster movies. He was the first and the most recognizable and distinguished of them all. However, with all of the great CGI improvements we have in the film industry no one has been able to truly create a great monster movie yet. One side of the coin is that in a monster movie, the filmmaker tends to rely too heavily on visual effects or they rely too heavily on the human survivors. Gareth Edwards is the director of this film and largely he is an unknown director up until this point. He received great praise for his work on the film Monsters and thanks to that the job of tackling Hollywood's greatest monster. From the looks of the two trailers, it seems that he has struck the perfect balance between focus on the human survivors and the monster. Above that, he has set a great tone to the film that is much darker then the previous Godzilla film starring Matthew Broderick that was largely disappointing. This film is still shrouded in secrecy so it is still difficult to say without a shadow of a doubt what exactly the plot-line will follow and how the human characters factor into everything.
The trailer opens up on a gigantic traffic jam followed by various different showings of destruction. This goes to show just how powerful this monster is and how terrifying it can be. The military plays a big part as they look to fight back, but are essentially hopeless. The nice element to this opening is the voice-over delivered by Bryan Cranston. It helps add to how dire the situation that they are in, while also showing that the government or the military is trying to cover up the real threat. It is then revealed that in 1954, they found something that they tried to kill with nuclear bombs but to no avail. Thus, this prompts Cranston's character, who I am guessing is a scientist who understands the gravity of the situation much better then any military power to explain to them how far over their head they really are.
Not much is known about the human characters played by Aaron Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe. It seems as if Elizabeth Olsen's character, Elle, is the daughter of Joe Brody (Cranston). It is impossible to say where it goes from there, but one could guess that the family is rather smart in the field of science for them to know how to deal with Godzilla more effectively. Interestingly enough, there is also a promise of more then just Godzilla in terms of monsters. It was teased before that there might be scorpion-like monster facing off against Godzilla, and in this trailer it seems that there was some sort of scorpion-like tail found underground. More and more will surely be known as we get closer to it's release date in May. After two promising trailers, I am sure audiences are rather excited to see Godzilla return to form.
