The One Director Who Could Make a Good Godzilla Reboot

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Do we really need another Godzilla movie? With the images from the 1998 version starring Matthew Broderick still burned into our retinas, it seems that the nuclear sea monster should stay stuck in the depths of classic film history.

Garreth Edwards, the man behind the sci-fi movie Monsters, has another creature on his hands. Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog has reported the director will helm the new Legendary Pictures reboot of the Godzilla franchise, which will be co-produced and financed by Warner Bros. Edwards will also work with a yet-to-be announced writer for the script for the movie, which has a tentative release date of 2012.

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Sure, a reboot may seem silly. But if there’s anyone to do the job right and come up with something innovative, we’d place our bets on Edwards. His debut film Monsters was a creative test of how to make a sci-fi monster film with less than $100,000, and he pulled it off. Using only two actors and a very limited crew, he traveled through South America and improved with the local people, landscape and events to make his movie. Afterwards in post production, he added the “monster” in and worked around scenes they shot to make the story work. The film could have used a bit more creatures from outer space, but what results is an suspense-filled story about two people trying to survive told in a unique way.

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“The one allegorical political thing that did interest me was the idea of labeling something a monster, calling it evil and then feeling like we have to eradicate it because it kills people, right, which is fine,” he said in an interview with Techland. “But at what price do you kill a monster? If you are killing, in terms of eradicating it, if you end up killing 100 times or 1000 times more people than the thing you are killing ever kills, is that worth it? Or is it acceptable because it’s foreign people and not western people? So those sort of debates, I know we have a monster movie so it’s not serious as all that, but that’s the level of questions I really like.”

For more on Edwards, check out Techland’s interview with the director about Monsters.