Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla is a good movie, and if you think otherwise, you are entitled to be wrong. It’s a good movie, and it gave us the instantly iconic line, “Let them fight.” The rebooted monster universe—Kong: Skull Island is part of this franchise—immediately established its penchant for absolutely insane logic as characters take one look at a giant f*ck-off radiation monster and go, Yeah the planet is theirs and we are but ants. But even by the “let them fight” standard, the “give up and surrender to your inevitable death” logic presented in the first trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters is STUNNING.
First of all, this trailer looks AMAZING. It’s not uncommon to get clearly unfinished CGI in trailers, but every shot in this trailer is polished and ready for distribution. I can’t even imagine the overtime that went into making that happen (never forget that the VFX industry survives on razor-thin margins and the movies we love get made by people working under borderline if not outright exploitative conditions). But once you get past all the beautiful shots of monsters emerging from the mist, you start to hear what Vera Farmiga is saying and it makes NO SENSE.
She’s talking about a mass extinction event, which at first I assumed to be the arrival of Godzilla et al, but then she’s like, the only way to survive it is to let the “titans” duke it out. Wait, what? So is she talking about climate change? The only way to combat climate change is to let Godzilla and Mothra fight it out? Even by established batsh*t Godzilla logic, this is super insane. Part of me hopes this voice over is out of context for the purposes of the trailer, but then, honestly, part of me does hope the movie is just this insane.
But really, who cares, because MONSTERS. This has allllll the monsters. There’s Godzilla, and Mothra, and the three-headed dragon Ghidorah, and the giant pterodactyl Rodan, and the turtle-god Gamera—twelve-year-old me is VERY into this movie. Adult me is into it, too, because ridiculous story logic aside, it looks so gorgeous and has Kyle Chandler, so there is no reason not to see this movie. I just hope the whole thing isn’t shot at night and/or in the rain, like Godzilla. And yes, I do want to see them all fight.
