Gareth Edwards is the latest indie-filmmaker to make it big and go Hollywood. Early last year he captured everyone’s attention with his shoestring budgeted monster movie, Monsters, and now Hollywood has hired him to direct a big budget, romantic musical. No, I’m kidding. He’s directing Godzilla.
THR says Edwards is close to signing a deal with Legendary Pictures which would put him in the director’s chair for their new take on the classic mega-monster. Legendary snagged the rights to the Japan-destroying giant lizard last year from Toho and they’ve been eager to do something with it ever since. They even leaked some pretty cool concept art over the summer. Well why not?
The world can’t have too much Godzilla and sure, the last time Hollywood really tried it in 1998 the film was Ferris Bueller-powered disaster, but that’s no reason to stop trying. Edwards’ indie-film convincingly pulled off massively scaled creatures on a shoestring budget, the guy proved he can handle the genre, it makes sense to let him try his hand at making monster movies with enough money to blow up a few cities.
Even as someone who didn’t like Monsters, I’m excited to see what Gareth can do here. For me Monsters failed largely because of it’s slight political bent and, in part because it simply didn’t have the money to do everything it wanted to and was thus forced to spend most of its time teasing. But when Monsters does get around to big, monster special effects, even if it’s only for three or four minutes, it’s pretty spectacular. Take out the politics, stretch the five minutes of monsters over ninety minutes, and you’d have a pretty kick-ass Godzilla movie. Besides, it’s been too long since someone stomped Tokyo. Go get em Gojira.
