As I pointed out a few posts back, I liked the recently unveiled trailer for the 2014 “Godzilla.” It just seems creepy and serious. But someone else posted a few comments HERE that got me thinking about it further, and *if* the film goes in the right direction, it could be *really* good:
I love how they’re evoking the feeling of overwhelming, primordial terror here. The music, the aura of storm and lightning that seems to follow Godzilla. It’s almost Lovecraftian, eldritch in tone. The monster is this titanic, inscrutable and inimical force of nature that’s absolutely terrifying to witness.
The whole subtext of Gojira at his Hadean Eon, Cosmic Horror best is: This Planet is Not Yours, Mankind.
Neat.
The previous American “Godzilla” was just a big dumb animal stomping around New York making a mess. It was not an existential threat; worst came to it, you knew that the USAF could have shoved an AGM-86 up it’s keister and vaporized it with a nuke. I know a lot of people like the Japanese Godzilla movies, but they never seemed to me to be much more than “a guy in a rubber suit stomping around Micro-Tokyo making a mess.” It all seemed terribly silly. But the possibility exists that something really remarkable could be made of it, if the movie makers follow the Lovecraftian “Cosmic Horror” model.
A monster in the Lovecraft mold is a bit different from most. In general, the better ones are more like a force of nature than a traditional monster. A Lovecraftian monster isn’t out to scare you, or hurt you, or kill you… you are beneath its notice. And that’s something that just bugs the hell out of people: when their enemy has so little regard for them that they simply ignore them, people go bonkers. And so a Lovecraftian monster would cause all manner of mayhem, and would threaten the extinction of Man or All Life On Earth… and not even really notice that they are doing it, or care if they did know. It would be simply a matter of clearing the surface off to Cthulhuform the planet to their liking with no more notice taken of us than we’d care about the bacteria wiped out when dusting a tabletop.
Lovecrafts futilitarian worldview, where all of Man’s great achievements are, at best, making a very slight delaying action against the inevitable victory of cosmic forces of chaos we couldn’t possible hope to understand (never mind defeat) would make a hell of a monster movie. Will “Godzilla” live up to that? Probably not. I had equally high hopes for “Cloverfield” back when nobody knew a thing about it and the possibility still existed that it just might be a Cthulhu Attacks New York movie. But a guy can dream.