Frank Darabont Says the Upcoming GODZILLA Movie Will be Traditional, Not Campy

Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros are prepping to return the cinematic sci-fi icon to its monstrous roots with a new gritty actioner scheduled for theatrical release nest summer.

Godzilla was officially announced that last year's Comic Con International in San Diego where a footage reel debuted and well received by viewers. Gareth Edwards (Monsters) has been hired to direct the film off a screenplay by David Callaham (The Expendables), David S. Goyer (the Dark Knight trilogy) and Max Borenstein (The Seventh Son). Drew Pearce (Iron Man 3) recently performed rewrites on the script.

Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Walking Dead, The Mist) was recently hired to rewrite the film's script before production begins in March. The story is said to be very in tune with the character's mythology, albeit with a contemporary spin, and will not draw from the drastic deviations of the 1998 film directed by Roland Emmerich.

Darabont has now offered a few words about the project, including his motivation behind taking the job and what tone he and the film makers are reaching for:

"What I found very interesting about Godzilla is that he started off definitely as a metaphor for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And some of the atom bomb testing we were doing in the South Pacific in the subsequent years. The giant terrifying force of nature that comes and stomps the shit out of your city, that was Godzilla. Filtered through the very fanciful imaginations of the Japanese perception. And then he became Clifford the Big Red Dog in the subsequent films. He became the mascot of Japan, he became the protector of Japan. Another big ugly monster would show up and he would fight that monster to protect Japan. Which I never really quite understood, the shift.

"What we're trying to do with the new movie is not have it camp, not have it be campy. We're kind of taking a cool new look at it. But with a lot of tradition in the first film. We want this to be a terrifying force of nature. And what was really cool, for me, is there was a very compelling human drama that I got to weave into it. It's not that cliched, thinly disguised romance or bromance, or whatever. It's different, it's a different set of circumstances than you're used to seeing. And that's tremendously exciting as a writer when you're asked to do something else."

Godzilla is currently scheduled for theatrical release on May 16th, 2014.