The first teaser trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero included a startlingly effective single shot, showing a circa 1940s Statue of Liberty with Godzilla walking by, heading toward the coast of New York City.
But the really special thing about the teaser was the composition and ingenious use of scale. Initially, Godzilla seems to be dwarfed by Lady Liberty. But as he moves forward and reaches the space where he should be seemingly stepping in front of the statue, he actually steps behind it, and you realize that he is further away from the camera than the statue is. In the blink of an eye, it goes from looking like the Statue of Liberty is bigger to revealing that Godzilla is a gargantuan towering presence over the landmark as he walks right by it.
It’s a really great visual and a fantastic encapsulation of the kinds of visual heft and weight that filmmaker and VFX artist Takashi Yamazaki gives the creatures in his films. But as it turns out, it’s even better than all that, because with Godzilla Minus Zero now in theaters, it’s been revealed that the teaser was actually also a narrative decoy of sorts. The version of this shot that is in the actual film takes thing up another couple of notches by (spoiler) having Godzilla haphazardly push over the Statue of Liberty as he passes.
How Cloverfield inspired that Godzilla Minus Zero scene
It’s a shocking moment in its own right that introduces audiences to the most singularly incendiary visual sequence of the film, and it is a beat that is given all the more heft because your expectation is so set to simply see Big G walk by, as he did in that teaser. As it turns out, though, this critical moment was actually inspired by an unlikely American monster movie: Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield.
Yamazaki revealed in a recent interview that the idea to visually introduce the New York scene in the film through the use of the Statue of Liberty was directly inspired by Reeves’ 2008 monster movie: "I was thinking of Cloverfield. The scene when the head of the Statue of Liberty comes flying towards you left a huge impression when I saw it… I wanted to capture that same kind of emotion here."
What’s so interesting about this is the unique lineage that connects these two films. For one, that scene in-question from Cloverfield was notably also featured as the film’s very first teaser trailer, with the Statue of Liberty’s head being thrown directly across the city and toward the characters’ found-footage camera.
But furthermore, that teaser trailer for Cloverfield didn’t actually have a title attached to it, as part of producer J.J. Abrams’ trademark mystery-boxing. So at the time, prior to more information being revealed about the film, many theorized that it was in fact a stealth American Godzilla film. That obviously turned out not to be the case, but to see Cloverfield now influencing a boa fide Godzilla movie years later is a crazy full-circle moment.
What’s more, it’s worth noting the Statue of Liberty moment in John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. While the 1981 film itself didn’t actually feature a decapitated Statue of Liberty, its marketing and posters did heavily, to visually convey the idea of a New York City in decay. And now, decades later, John Carpenter is hanging out with Yamazaki at the Godzilla Minus Zero premiere.
So in a unique way, Godzilla Minus Zero’s New York City sequences channel half-a-century’s worth of unique genre inspirations into a single image.
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