Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla was pretty well-received—especially compared to the last time an American studio tried to make a Godzilla movie—but Japan’s Toho Studios wasn’t impressed. Toho is the company behind the original Godzilla series, and a few months after the release of Edwards’ movie, it announced that it was developing a Godzilla reboot of its own that would not “lose to Hollywood.” To accomplish that, Toho decided to make sure that its Godzilla would be bigger and scarier than his American cousin by utilizing a combination of classic “guy in a suit” technology and modern computer animation.
Now, Toho has released a trailer for Shin Godzilla that gives us our first real look at just how big and scary this new incarnation of the world’s favorite walking nuclear metaphor is. Oddly, Godzilla himself doesn’t do much in this trailer, but there are a lot of glimpses of people who are probably talking about how scary he is and what ridiculous sci-fi lasers they should use to kill him. It doesn’t get much more Godzilla than that.
Shin Godzilla will be released in Japan on July 29.