Lack Of Music
Play back any of the previous trailers for Godzilla and you will immediately notice the incredibly ominous and haunting theme that serves as the icing on the cake to all the destruction and chaos. It’s best described as a faintly heard chant that gradually grows louder as the trailer goes on and builds to its bigger moments. Ultimately, if you remove that track from the trailer, it undoubtedly loses a lot of its intensity.
And so, with that in mind, expectations were set for Godzilla to have a pretty intense soundtrack full of themes that perfectly complemented all the monster on monster action. There’s also the fact that the whole soundtrack was being composed by an Oscar-nominated musician like Alexandre Desplat, inducing a sensation that the trailer theme wouldn’t be the only pulse pounding piece of music in the film. Unfortunately, it really is, but it’s not Desplat’s fault. There’s just not a whole lot of music in Godzilla at all, whether exposition is being dumped or monsters are fighting each other.
It’s not something that is immediately noticeable when watching the film upon a first viewing, but something that definitely sticks out in hindsight or after watching the trailer again. Specifically, there is a moment in the trailer when the military personnel are performing a HALO jump out of a helicopter with bright red flares in their hands, and as they are free-falling the piece of music hits its peak in intensity. That very same piece of music plays during the same scene of the actual movie, but it also serves as a reminder that the film as a whole has been rather light on the intense soundtrack that the trailer hinted at.