Something Enormous in the Fog

The 1998 Roland Emmerich Godzilla was a genuine catastrophe—not in the monster-movie sense, in the creative sense. A big nervous iguana, Matthew Broderick running around Manhattan, the entire premise of a creature that has haunted Japanese cinema since 1954 reduced to a summer blockbuster with nothing underneath it. The Japanese had been making Godzilla films for decades: imperfect, campy, frequently absurd, but sincere in a way Emmerich’s version wasn’t even trying to be.

Gareth Edwards’ trailer for his 2014 version is something else. Bryan Cranston is in it, visibly falling apart—always a promising sign. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen round out a cast that suggests someone in the production actually cared about human stakes. Ken Watanabe appears looking appropriately stricken, which is the correct expression when you’re standing in front of something the size of a skyscraper that is rearranging the coastline with total indifference.

The tone is everything. Where Emmerich gave us spectacle with nothing beneath it, Edwards seems to be reaching back toward the original premise—that Godzilla is less a monster movie than a film about consequence. About what it feels like to encounter something that doesn’t register your existence as meaningful. The trailer doesn’t oversell it. It sits with the dread for a moment before it cuts. If the full film can hold that restraint, it will have earned the name.