I read Teague's post this morning and it's been stewing in my head ever since. I haven't seen the Roland Emmerich Godzilla, or the Gareth Edwards one yet, though I'm kind of excited to do so sometime next week. I honestly kind of think the ship has sailed on Godzilla being truly scary to a degree. Godzilla and his monster battles break buildings, and we've made ourselves immune to that by doing it so much in the past decade. Unfortunately that seems to be kind of all he can be.
My first thought, and this is just sort of flow of consciousness at the moment, is to take it as far away from that as possible. If we can't frighten people with the spectacle of large scale destruction anymore, then I think it should be the fear of isolation. I've struggled to come up with a way to do that with Godzilla, this is the best I have so far.
A group of scientists are exploring these previously uncharted caverns. This is kind of a typical place to start one of these movies, where they either find Godzilla and he breaks free to go cause his mayhem, but we're going to be here for the entire movie. After we set-up our characters and their mission, an "earthquake" very quickly shuts off the only known exit. They can't contact anybody on the outside, so they decide the only thing to do is to go deeper into the caverns and look for a way out.
One of them has been 127 Hoursed by the cave-in, so they leave one of their group with him. There's no cell reception, but they have walkie talkies. The majority of the group goes out and explores the caverns, occasionally thinking they hear roars and such, but it's so quiet and indistinct they can't be certain. The two back at the cave-in site maintain a constant presence by asking questions and making jokes over the radio. The healthy one will report on the deteriorating status of the James Franco now and again. Probably the group finds some unexplainable goo, because that's the kind of thing you do in these movies. Then there's another earthquake, and they hear largely unintelligible screaming and exclamations over the walkie talkies.
The group at large returns to the cave-in site, and finds nothing of their two companions but the crushed arm or leg still pinned under the rock. So now they know there's a creature in here with them and they need to make their way out post-haste. The location would be this collection of vast caverns connected by tunnels of various sizes, ranging from small enough that our heroes have to crawl through to fucking massive.
The tension comes from the sound of roars growing more pronounced in the distance, the sound of footsteps, the recurring "earthquakes." The occasional run-in with Godzilla consists of an arm or a jaw struggling and snapping at them in the smaller tunnels from one of the larger caverns. They can catch site of the occasional tussle through a crack or something. But we never get a good look, we never see Godzilla or what he's fighting.
Until the third act, where the shit hits the fan and we meet our action quota. The explorer team makes it into this MASSIVE, beautiful cavern. Shortly thereafter Godzilla and his enemy appear, the enemy being this gigantic prehistoric hornet-type creature. So they're duking it out, and our heroes can see this dim shaft of light at the top of the cavern, that's of course their way out. They have to rock climb their way up to this opening WHILE Godzilla's fighting Hornet Mothra, so the walls are crumbling, they're constantly falling and slipping and losing purchase, all connected so one will drag others with them, in this crazy vertical action sequence with a monster battle as a backdrop/instigating force.
They finally make it into the opening, only to realize they're not out of the woods yet, this is just the hornet monster's labyrinthine, honeycomb-esque home base. He's seen them entering and isn't having it, so they have to make it up this series of winding, narrow tunnels WHILE being pursued by hornet monster, who is in turn pursued by Godzilla, whose actions are constantly threatening to bring the whole house down.
It's hard to succinctly explain the third act, but it looks hella cool in my head.
That's all I've got at the moment and I totally made most of it up as I went along. I know I don't have characters or theme, and probably I'm violating everything Godzilla has ever stood for, but that was the first
thing to come to mind.
EDIT: Couple of thoughts I had as I turned this over in my head after posting. Probably they should notice the opening and start their climb BEFORE the monsters show up fighting, because you'd be crazy to not wait them out. This also gets you a moment where they can be halfway up and they hear the approaching roars and footsteps and they're like "Seriously with this?" But now they're committed and HAVE to continue during the fight.
Also possibly, the Hornet monster could come OUT of the hole to establish it as his home that he's defending from Godzilla. And if the pudding wanted to be really overegged, the nest could have baby hornet monsters in it that the humans have to fight off with pickaxes and whatnot as they make their escape. Like the whatevers in Cloverfield.
Last edited by C-Spin (2014-05-17 17:42:07)
