SDCC '12 Report: Godzilla on the Remake Front (Again)!

Can Legendary Pictures remake Godzilla in a way that Toho Pictures originally intended many decades back? Their resume is good, but it has been a mixed bag of hits and misses. During San Diego Comic-Con '12, they have released a telling teaser poster and a trailer. Both of which may pay tribute to what the Japanese vision is.

In a poster that spells out the name of the beast in Japanese (ゴジラ) and placed behind the American spelling, maybe not. The kanji are painted in muted red. The poster design is also familiar. Just look at the DVD Steel Book release of Akira Special Edition by Pioneer. The layout is different but the steel font is very much the same. The Japanese text is placed in front of Akira, and with Gojira, it's pushed back, making for a nuance to tell viewers which interpretation takes precedence.

Ever since 1954, the vision from director Ishirō Honda was that of showing how a rolling nuclear attack can devastate a nation. It was a film that did not have Raymond Burr in it, and it was a movie that and showed what science can do to mankind since becoming a child of the atom. The special effects made by Eiji Tsuburaya were spectacular for its time, and the black and white format only enhanced the devastation that the beast wrought.

Amongst the planned list of producers is Roy Lee. His early credits include the porting of Asian properties like The Ring and The Grudge to America. However mixed the feelings are for making a new film based on an already best-selling film from another country, he is in the camp that believes subtitles are bad and reconstructing is good.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, executive producers Yoshimitsu Banno, Kenji Okuhira, and Doug Davison are going to work with Legendary's Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni to make this reboot succeed. Everyone wants to avoid the travesty of what Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin did in the 1998 version.

Tull is quoted by Hollywood Reporter to reveal that the team intends to do justice to those essential elements that have allowed this character to remain as pop-culturally relevant for as long as it has. But for an icon that is more significant to the Japanese than American, the hope film analysts can cross their fingers for is that these producers know the points that Honda wanted to make with his film. He was not out to make a monster fighting another monster film.

Raymond Burr was never in the original piece. He was tacked on for the American version in order to sell the product for a world-wide audience. In a report made at Bloody Disgusting, the trailer that premiered at the SDCC has Burr's voiceover and that can make for some massive confusion. While Burr did indeed help bring Godzilla to the masses for an English-speaking world, he did not contribute anything to the original monster lexicon.

The official word from Toho Pictures is that another film is still years away. He is technically retired from the Japanese cinema scene and may not resurface till sometime after 2014. In America, land of the impatient, Lee negotiated the rights to remake it with no mention of an endorsement from the Japanese studio.

Sadly, even though the war is over, the Nippon nation will never get any respect.

Sources:

Godzilla at Bloody Disgusting

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Posted in: 2012,2012 release,creature feature,japanese,remake