Good afternoon, I hope you’re ready for some bonkers Godzilla trailer deconstruction. Some definite spoiler speculation ahead that may or may not be at least half correct.
Ok, spoiler folks gone? Cool cool.
On the afternoon of Sunday, January 24, 2021, Warner Bros. released the first trailer for Godzilla VS Kong. The film has been delayed multiple times after being finished last year due to the goings-on of our current-year pandemic. However, resulting from a release schedule plan begun with Wonder Woman 1984, Warner Bros. has decided to temporarily take its film slate of massive properties awaiting release, and push them out for an exclusive thirty one day simulcast for HBO Max subscribers in the US as well as play in whatever theaters are still open.
The current release for the film was announced via Variety to be moved back from March 26 to March 31st. You can see the trailer below.
But now wait a heckin’ second. What is going on in this trailer? Well, besides the fact that it is a big dumb movie about monsters wrestling each other that leans into being a big dumb monster movie really hard, there is some interesting manipulation going on in the marketing, and a mystery to pick apart for the fandom of uncle Goji.
And It’s Mechagodzilla. Like it’s about as good a secret as Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan. Mechagodzilla evidence is all over this trailer. Let’s break it down.
2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters set a new tone for Legendary’s Monsterverse setting up for a big grudge match by showing Godzilla at his most powerful after destroying Fenway Park and also King Ghidorah. In the film’s credits, we see a cave painting of Godzilla and King Kong attacking one another. We come away from that movie with a tone that humans are scrambling to deal with the kaiju and their king, and that they’ve had in-fighting centuries before.
This trailer conveys a strange tone as we see destruction across the globe, and Monarch pins Godzilla as the culprit. But as the last film’s stars Kyle Chandler and Millie Bobbie Brown enter the trailer, we’re met with dialogue showing they’re not sure why it’s happening.
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Meanwhile, rabid fans have quickly deconstructed the trailer to find the head of Godzilla’s longtime nemesis amidst the rubble and destruction in the trailer’s opening shots: Mechagodzilla. There he is, in all his chrome headed glory, framing Godzilla for the havoc being caused the world over, thus plenty of simple justification for Monarch to go ahead and reluctantly retrieve a now much larger and 50 years older King Kong from Skull Island, the star of the film Kong Skull Island.
But when you have a mecha involved, it needs a pilot, and someone to build it. Don’t worry, the trailer drops plenty of hints at this too. At the 1:41 minute mark in the trailer, we see a young man standing in front of a screen that clearly has a diagnostics chart for Mechagodzilla, and a voice pattern to probably duplicate Godzilla’s call established by the last film’s MacGuffin device.
But who is the man? The actor is Shun Oguri, credited by the film’s IMDB page as Ren Serizawa. That would make him the son of doctor Ishiro Serizawa, who sacrificed himself at the end of act two of 2019’s King of the Monsters to revive Godzilla to maximum radiation capacity.
We can imagine a young man brash enough to pilot a mecha unit the scale of Mechagodzilla would be complicit in some revenge for his father’s death. The results of which will cause a revival of age-old grudge match between our iconic monsters, not unlike the intent of Daniel Brule’s Zemo in 2016’s Captain America Civil War.
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But he couldn’t have built Mechagodzilla himself. The film shows a map with notes strewn across it with evidence of two things: Monarch has no idea what it’s doing, and there is a company called Apex, or noted on the film’s secondary characters on the IMDB, Apex Cybernetics. The report of this has been researched through leaks by DreadCentral and Video Essayist Mr. H. However, we can’t consider these details as leaks for very long because there is an official viral marketing account on Twitter named @Apex_Sciences, that is definitely part of a marketing campaign as it follows and retweets promo material for Godzilla vs Kong. You can follow the GPS coordinates on google maps and begin the viral hunt yourself! I got work to do.
One last little detail I noticed, in case all this wasn’t evidenced enough for you, is in the Warner Bros., and Legendary logo, alluding to cybernetics data in the form of NeonPunk aesthetic, Matrix style, motherboard data stream particles.
The only question I’ve yet to have a solid answer on is who is attacking the Apex Science stations if not Godzilla? Is it other Kaiju? Or is it perhaps Charles Dance and his team of Eco Terrorists? It’s hard to say, and there still may be more to unpack from this flashy trailer.
Let us know what you think in the comments below or on our social media with Twitter and Instagram!
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