"GODZILLA" Has a Full Trailer, Still Not Much Godzilla

I am so nervous about this.



Godzilla should be easy. The basic appeal of Kaiju movies (disaster movies where the disaster itself gets to be a character with a "face," personality, personal narrative, etc) is so, well... basic it's maddening that so few (modern, Western) filmmakers try and so many of those who do keep fucking it up.

This is, to be clear, a really good scifi/disaster movie trailer. They're clearly anchoring the emotional center of the story to Bryan Cranston as an ordinary, utterly average human whose clearly being destroyed by having this unimaginably huge, horrible event falling down around him; which is the right way to go for this project but also a seriously smart move for Cranston, who really needs for his first huge post-"BREAKING BAD" stardom feature to highlight the range that he has beyond Walter White. I'm just sure I'm getting much in the way of a "genuine Godzilla vibe" out of this, which worries me because "genuine Godzilla" is such a broadly-defined thing to begin with.

I like the idea that this is a semi-sequel to the original (that's how all of Toho's reboots have worked so far: The first movie always happened, everything else is new) though I'm curious how they plan to make this "cover-up" angle work: This Godzilla seems to be the largest in size yet, and the ubiquity of cameras today makes the idea of "covering up" that whatever is going on is being caused by a giant dinosaur (climate-change denialist metaphor, I'm assuming?) could seriously strain credulity.

Above all else, I'm trying not to let how much I detested "MONSTERS" taint me on this. We'll see.