The new trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monster is here. First screened over the weekend at Brazilian comic convention CCPX, the latest trailer is now online.
As in the first trailer, we see Millie Bobby Brown of Stranger Things manning some sort of radio station. But her vigil doesn't last long, because the second King of the Monsters trailer soon delves into the mass-scale destruction we should expect from this sequel to 2014's Godzilla and last year's Kong: Skull Island.
Which of these Titans are here to protect us, and which of these Titans are here to threaten us? See the new trailer for #GodzillaMovie – in theaters May 31. pic.twitter.com/GflxoKROS4
— Godzilla: King of the Monsters (@GodzillaMovie) December 10, 2018
"So, you'd want to make Godzilla our pet," a politician asks.
"No, we would be his," Ken Watanabe as Project Monarch scientist Dr. Ishiro Serizawa says.
One of the more interesting thematic considerations going into Godzilla: King of the Monsters is characters, including Serizawa. Even the Toho Godzilla movies waffled on the morality of their monsters from movie to movie, with Godzilla sometimes a hero, sometimes a destroyer. Ultimately, Godzilla's war with other kaiju doesn't seem to have much to do with us at all… a weird position for human movie protagonists to find themselves in.
But whatever moral ambiguity may exist in Godzilla' actions, there's one Godzilla villain you can depend on for pure destructive evil: King Ghidorah. Though photos of action figures have given us a rough idea of what Ghidorah looks like, it's only in this latest trailer that Ghidorah is finally exposed in the flesh.
Godzilla was first introduced in 1954's Gojira, but his greatest villain didn't appear until 1964's Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, which introduced the winged, Typhon-like monstrosity as an extraterrestrial, who had already destroyed the Venusian civilization. It's unclear whether King of the Monsters will reprise this origin story for Ghidorah, but the trailer does suggest the plot will be surprisingly similar to Ghidorah 's first movie, with Mothra and Rodan teaming up with Godzilla to expunge the three-headed menace from Earth.
Godzilla King of the Monsters, directed by Michael Dougherty (Trick 'r Treat), stars Vera Farmiga, Sally Hawkins, Kyle Chandler, O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Bradley Whitford. That's a surprising pool of talent for a monster movie, but it remains to be seen exactly what they'll have to do while Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and Ghidorah are pummeling each other.
Building off Godzilla and Kong: Skull Island, King of the Monsters looks to put a substantial focus on its long-secret cryptozoological intelligence agency, Project Monarch. The scale of destruction on display in this trailer suggest Monarch may no longer be able to operate in secrecy, but will instead have to take a leadership role in charting a path for humanity through the kaiju's destructive swathe.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters is out in theaters May 31, 2019.
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