The big green monster gets his close-up at WonderCon's Godzilla presentation.
No question about it: the highlight of the Warner Bros. Pictures presentation at WonderCon in Anaheim on Saturday (April 19) was a full frontal shot.
But before you start imagining what it would be like to see your favorite actor or actress naked on a tremendous screen in the 9,000-seat Anaheim Convention Center arena, settle down: this wasn’t even a look at a person, but a lizard.
When that beast is named Godzilla, however, and only a tiny little sliver of the public has seen this image beforehand, the excitement level is just as intense. The capacity crowd at the arena exploded with delight and awe as director Gareth Edwards unveiled a clip – previously seen only by a much smaller audience at Austin’s South by Southwest festival – that exposed the legendary Japanese monster in all his glory.
The clip showed, in context, a number of images we’ve seen in the brilliant trailers for the movie so far. The locale looks like Hawaii. Star Aaron Taylor-Johnson is on some sort of elevated train, seated next to a young Japanese boy. The train stops as the power goes off. Meanwhile, a man at a beach luau grabs his wife and daughter as a massive tsunami-like wave heads toward shore.
Ken Watanabe watches from the deck of a vessel out at sea as a gigantic shape passes underneath it. The tsunami hits the shore and a deluge of water floods the beaches and crashes through the local streets, drowning untold numbers and turning the downtown area into a swamp.
Then the power comes back on – and Johnson looks through the window of the train to see a large creature (a mix of insect and lobster which resembles the monster from Cloverfield in many ways) stomping into an airport. The thing (known as a Muto) flips planes and other vehicles with ease, turning a runway into an inferno as horrified passengers watch through a gate window.
Then the window itself is blocked by a massive, scaled foot, we see the Muto spin around to look – and then comes the money shot: a long, slow tilt that starts at Godzilla’s feet and crawls all the way up to his fearsome head as he bellows his famous roar.
Thousands of fans screamed their own approval as the clip faded to black (one fellow near us kept shouting, “Thank you! Thank you!”) and Edwards broke out in an ear-to-ear grin.
He didn’t give up any secrets or revelations in his chat with moderator Drew McWeeny (which also featured another look at the movie’s latest trailer), but he probably didn’t have to – that one view of Godzilla was enough to send this crowd out happy.
The rest of the Warner Bros. presentation included a look at Tom Cruise’s new time travel war film, Edge of Tomorrow, with an appreciative Bill Paxton (who co-stars in the film) showing up and getting a rousing ovation from the crowd – particularly when he threw out some of his classic lines from Aliens and Weird Science. Asked why he thought they hired him for Edge of Tomorrow, Paxton replied, “They needed someone to shout ‘Game over, man!’”
The Edge of Tomorrow trailer was suitably action-packed; we’ll see if director Doug Liman makes the story (based on the graphic novel All You Need is Kill) equally rousing. Paxton remarked that the combat suits he, Cruise and Emily Blunt wore in the film each weighed 75 pounds: “They had these iron cages on the set in which they literally hung us on chains to take the weight off our shoulders between takes.”
Warner Bros.’ third offering yesterday afternoon was a look at the new tornado disaster movie, Into the Storm– which seems to be an updated, more visually enhanced version of Twister. We’re always up for a good disaster flick, though, and from the footage displayed, director Steven Quale (previous a visual effects supervisor on Avatar) takes the viewers right into the heart of what it feels like to be in the midst of a slew of freak storms. One shot of a tornado literally on fire was either over the top or striking in a surreal way – it’s hard to say which.
But make no mistake – the biggest force of nature on display here was Godzilla.
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