Your First Look At Godzilla: The Art Of Destruction
Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla reboot continues to stomp towards us with giant, earth-shaking footsteps. Last week Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures just kept piling on the promotion, with more than half a dozen new TV spots, as well as an awesome extended look, until we wondered what the hell we were going to see next. Now we have an answer to that question: we’ve got our first look at a new book called Godzilla: The Art of Destruction, which is full of concept art and designs from the movie.
Published by Insight Editions, Nerdist got the first good look at the book by Mark Cotta Vaz, and there’s some cool stuff in here. Topping out at 156-pages, Art of Destruction provides a glimpse at how the filmmakers envisioned the chaos and devastation they wanted their film to encompass. From what we’ve seen from the finished product, they did a hell of a job translating the ideas from page to screen.
Even the cover of this book is freaking epic. That image of the King of the Monsters about to chow down on a puny human helicopter, especially colored a deep blood red, is enough to get you excited for the movie. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to take a chopper up against a skyscraper tall radioactive lizard? I could have told you that’s a terrible idea.
One of the recent TV spots we have showed the control room at a nuclear facility, and I remarked that it looked dated, like something out of an earlier era. Apparently that’s the way it was designed. Here you get to see Bryan Cranston’s Dr. Brody hard at work at the Janjira nuclear facility.
A fallen radioactive sign is never a good omen, and when you throw in all sort of gloom and fog and ominous silhouettes of ruined buildings, you have the makings of one hell of a creepy set. This is exactly what the film was going for in the “Q-Zone” scenes.
Since we haven’t seen the movie, we don’t know exactly where these pictures occur in the movie, or what the exact scenario is, but this picture shows Dr. Brody and his son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) go back to what is apparently their old neighborhood. Or at least it used to be a neighborhood, before everyone was evacuated, presumably after some sort of radiation leak or perhaps a Godzilla attack.
You know what you don’t expect to see? The ass end of a nuclear submarine sticking out of a jungle, that’s what. But when there are giant monsters stomping about, picking things up, flinging them around willy-nilly, you’re bound to end up with something like that.
Here are the storyboards for that striking HALO jump that prominently features in much of the footage we’ve seen. Part of why that scene sticks out so much is the color palate, those sharp red streams against the flat grey backgrounds, and you can see the origins of this scene in the drawings.
And lastly, this wouldn’t be a Godzilla book without a look at the man of the hour himself, and though it isn’t crystal clear, he is certainly there, screaming as he always does, ready to create on hell of a mess.
Godzilla may not open everywhere until May 16, but Godzilla: The Art of Destruction will be available earlier that week on May 13.
