I’ve never seen a movie so afraid to promote itself.
At last the official teaser has been released. Legendary Pictures has been doing everything they can to keep the Comic-Con teaser out of circulation. For some reason they wanted this to be the first trailer seen by the general public. With no other promotion I’m aware of this should be as huge as a trailer can be.
It’s not.
I think Legendary is trying the same thing that Tri-Star did with their US Godzilla-ish movie by not showing the monster, letting him be a surprise. I don’t have a problem with that. And I know this is a teaser and not the full trailer. That said, it’s just a bunch of people running around or in their homes looking scared. Are they characters important to the story or random civilians/military guys that will only appear in the teaser or some establishing scene meant for the teaser/upcoming trailer? I thought the leaked video did a better job as a teaser. This looks more like a lite trailer. (Half the calories. Half the taste.)
The quick look at Godzilla is the same from the leaked teaser so nothing new there. But since this one probably won’t be taken down I can finally talk about it. They’re still embracing the “CG rules, costume drools” approach I see. I will give them credit that I like how he moves and in the red dusty haze he looks quite real. How he will look in the final movie is what’s important, however, and I wonder if he will portray that sense of power than GINO/Zilla failed to. There’s still something to be said for practical effects.
But listen again to that roar. Give Emmerich’s team credit for making their monster sound like Godzilla. LegendZilla sounds more like an early attempt to reproduce the classic sound (apparently nobody is able to license the actual roaring noise from Toho), but maybe they’ll fix it by the time the actual film comes out next year.
Frankly, this doesn’t do a lot to calm my concerns (focus more on Matt’s video than the one area I responded to) with the direction of the movie, but it also doesn’t make me any more concerned. Maybe the full trailer will do something to convince me one way or the other if the movie will be any good. Hopefully we’ll find out soon…if they remember to do anything else to promote this movie.
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