by: S. Scott Stanikmas

Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla was one of the biggest disappointments for me last year. I wasn’t let down by not seeing the king of the kaiju for mere moments onscreen, what irked me was the fact that the final fight essentially took place in the dark and you couldn’t see anything. And the previous fights before the last battle were mere snippets. I wanted full on monster fights!

When Legendary Pictures announced a sequel, I was a little reluctant to get behind it. Even with the promise of possibly seeing classic villains like Rodnan, Mothra or Ghidorah I still can’t get too excited.

Max Borenstein, who wrote the first film, was asked to come back and script the second one. The scribe talked to Collider about how the process was going:

No, I’m doing it. I’m writing it now, and it’s really going to be great. I don’t want to go off book and tell you anything that I’m not allowed to tell you. The response to the first film was really exciting, but now that that world is established, we can do bigger and even better things. We’re really stoked.

So really light on details, but I’m hoping this next film turns out a little better in the visuals department when it comes to the fights.

Godzilla 2 is set to release in theaters on June 8, 2018.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, Japanese studio Toho is hard at work at bringing their version of the big green lizard to life. And new word coming out of the Land of the Rising Sun is that a new type of special effects will be used to bring the visuals to life.

An article at ABC News talks about the process that filmmakers Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi (Neon Genesis Evangelion and the upcoming Attack On Titan film) are taking to bring Godzilla to life on the silver screen:

Higuchi’s special-effects techniques were amply demonstrated in Attack on Titan, a new release received favorably in Japan. The work combines computer graphics with manipulating a towering doll of rippling red muscle that resembles a giant biological anatomy chart, as well as special-effects filmmaking, using actors moving through miniatures, to depict grotesquely enlarged humans. Applying to Godzilla that kind of technology, which Higuchi calls “hybrid,” has never been attempted in Japan. Higuchi is promising just that.

That sounds interesting. It will be neat to see how these two versions differ when we can finally compare them side-by-side.

Principal photography for the 29^th Japanese Godzilla film is set to start this September.