Juliette Binoche And Four Other Reasons To Be Excited About ‘Godzilla’

The upcoming Godzilla remake, reboot, re-something from Legendary Pictures is not unreasonably being treated with a little skepticism. But there are reasons to be excited, beyond, but including, casting hot French actresses.

It Was Unlikely Another Godzilla Movie Was Ever Going To Be Made

Toho will never admit this, but after Godzilla: Final Wars, they were pretty much taking the Big G out back, Old Yeller style. For all the claims of “retirement”, Toho not only wrapped up the series, but also destroyed their water tank. And to be fair, it’s not like the Millenium series, although interesting, lit the box office on fire. Even when Toho delivered a great monster movie like GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, which in G-fan quarters is considered a classic almost superior to the original Gojira, it was mostly seen as a cult curiosity.

Toho’s got to keep the lights on, and Godzilla just wasn’t paying the bills. So if Hollywood didn’t step in, one of the longest running franchises in film history would have died. Besides, who doesn’t love giant monsters?

They’re Using The Classic Monster

Radioactive breath, proper roar, original fat-around-the-hips lizard design, all of it. It’s going to be a Godzilla movie in the sense that Godzilla is actually in it, not some knock-off that gets cornholed in a Toho movie and that we will never speak of again.

Frank Darabont Is Writing the Script

Darabont is best known for The Shawshank Redemption, but the man really loves monster movies, as a quick revisit of his gleefully gory take on The Blob makes clear. And he wants to make Godzilla scary again, which is saying something.

Gareth Edwards Is Directing

Monsters, Edwards’ 2010 science fiction film, is not a classic, mostly because Edwards as a storyteller is prone to the thuddingly obvious. But it was also a movie made for less than a million bucks that had convincing giant monsters and built a real, genuine world.

Imagine what he can do with $80 million, and a producer that tells him to maybe be a little more subtle.

Juliette Binoche Is In It

Hey, having a talented actress who happens to be pretty hot has never hurt a movie. Besides, Binoche doesn’t have to do anything she doesn’t want to at this point in her career; she’s spent the last few years working with guys like David Cronenberg and Abbas Kiarostami, racking up the awards and generally doing whatever she feels like. So the fact that she feels like doing a giant monster movie tells us there’s some promise to this.