'Godzilla' Teaser Poster And Footage Description [Comic-Con 2012]

Legendary Pictures showed off two giant monster movies today in Hall H at the San Diego Comic Con. One was expected — Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim, which we'll have a report on very soon from Angie Han. The other wasn't exactly unexpected, but the appearance of Gareth Edwards' Godzilla wasn't confirmed until teaser footage rolled.

So, after the massive spectacle of Pacific Rim, a movie that is chock-full of monsters and robots, how did Godzilla look?

The teaser (which was shown twice) is fairly brief, with the camera slowly moving through an utterly devastated urban landscape. There's even a building that looks like a monster walked right through it, and we see the suggestion of a six-armed beast lying dead in rubble. Then the money shot: Godzilla, seen from behind, turning his head to the camera in profile before emitting the monster's signature screech.

The vision of Godzilla was more a suggestion than a detailed reveal, but the guy is HUGE, with a tail and spines up his back that are very clearly meant to evoke the classic creature design. The head is a bit more elongated than the first couple iterations of the beast, but not to the degree of the version seen in the Emmerich remake.

While director Gareth Edwards (Monsters) did come out on stage, where he proclaimed that he's making a realistic film rather than a sci-fi picture, we don't know how this teaser represents the film he plans to make. If any footage has been shot for the film (I don't know that we've even had confirmation before this that it is greenlit) it has done so in total secrecy, so what we saw today might be more proof of concept than anything else.

And it seems that this Godzilla will keep the thematic influence of atomic energy seen in the original film, as the teaser features a paraphrased quote from the Bhagavad Gita that was once uttered by Manhattan Project participant J. Robert Oppenheimer, as seen below:

Here's the teaser poster: