‘Godzilla’ trailer: Bryan Cranston panics, destruction rains down

Bryan Cranston is not a happy camper in the newly released trailer for the upcoming “Godzilla” reboot, and given the widespread destruction all around him, it’s easy to see why.

As the video surveys downed planes, terrified crowds, smoldering wreckage and hovering military helicopters, a desperate Cranston, playing scientist Joe Brody, seethes. “You are not fooling anybody when you say that what happened was a natural disaster,” he says. “You’re lying. It was not an earthquake, it wasn’t a typhoon. Because what’s really happening is that you’re hiding something out there — and it is going to send us back to the Stone Age!”

That something, of course, is Godzilla himself, the King of All Monsters, of whom the trailer gradually offers glimpses — first obscured by water and veiled by plumes of smoke, then seemingly too large to even fit in frame — as a scaly source of annihilation.

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The trailer, which you can watch above, also hints at how the new “Godzilla” film, directed by Gareth Edwards, will connect to the mythology of the 1954 Japanese original. The U.S. military’s nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1950s weren’t actually tests, we learn.

“They were trying to kill it,” says Ken Watanabe’s character, who is rumored to have the same name as the protagonist of the original film, Daisuke Serizawa.

“Godzilla” also stars Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. The movie marks Edwards’ second outing in the kaiju genre, after his 2010 independent film “Monsters,” which earned praise for its deft mix of eye-catching effects and arty atmospherics.

“Godzilla” is scheduled for release May 16 from Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures.

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