MUTO

A couple of weeks from release and it's still hard to get a handle on what kind of Godzilla film Gareth Edwards has made. Western trailers have barely mentioned any enemy beasts and kept the sense of threat focused on the titular kaiju. Those ads have had a elliptical, apocalyptic quality that suggests a 60th anniversary reinterpretation of Ishiro Honda's 1954 original.

This Chinese trailer takes a completely different tact, revelling in confrontations with a concrete coloured monster that either mutates into various forms, or has a string of similar looking pals. Couple that with a few gasps of dialogue that seem to organise Godzilla into a celestial protector role and you have something closer to the Heisei cycle meets Yoshimitsu Banno's Godzilla vs Hedorah. Perhaps Pacific Rim is to blame for the mixed messages? Guillermo del Toro's mech-pilot punch up tanked in America but found an audience in China, raking in enough money to make a sequel a real possibility.