A new trailer for Minoru Kawasaki’s daikaiju comedy Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit, which I first wrote about here, was released yesterday—and unlike the first teaser it includes some actual footage! There was some confusion over whether this movie would be a full-blown comedy or a serious attempt at an old school monster flick. Judging from this new trailer, Kawasaki seems to have struck a nice balance between his trademark wacked-out sense of humor and his love of the genre, but we’ll have to wait a while to know for sure. “Monster X” opens July 26, 2008 in Japan. Below you’ll find the teaser followed by the new trailer.

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Takashi Miike‘s new film, God’s Puzzle (Kamisama no Puzzle) opens in Japan this Saturday and I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around what it’s actually about. That puts me in good company, however, because apparently Miike didn’t understand the plot himself when he first read it. The script, based on a novel by Shinji Kimoto, is rife with physics jargon and theoretical science. Knowing how important it is for a director to understand the material he’s trying to interpret, Miike came up with a clever solution - split the original lead role into twins. The thinking behind this decision was that Motokazu (Hayato Ichihara), the new main character that was not in the original novel could explain principles of physics in simple terms that an audience could easily understand. Hopefully that method of simplification combined with a whole lot of CGI-created visual representations will help bridge the gap between entertainment and a 2+ hour science lesson.

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Hayato Ichihara stars as twins who team up with a dropout (Mitsuki Tanimura) to create a new universe from scratch. This trailer also includes a mini featurette with the two leads and director Takashi Miike.

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Hayato Ichihara stars as twins who team up with a dropout (Mitsuki Tanimura) to create a new universe from scratch.

watch »

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Hayato Ichihara stars as twins who team up with a dropout (Mitsuki Tanimura) to create a new universe from scratch.

watch »

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