Gareth Edwards
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Jurassic Park (1993)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Godzilla (2014), Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), Monsters (2010)
Visuals Themes
…we don’t own a Jurassic-themed Jeep…
Yes, there’s some unavoidable tropes common in all Jurassic Park films — the convenience store dino stalking and the shady corporate exec who only cares about a big payday to name a few — but Jurassic World Rebirth navigates them in a manner to keep it entertaining.
It’s obviously trying hard to replicate the wonder of Dr. Grant and Dr. Sadler’s arrival in the original Jurassic Park, but Bailey sells Loomis’ tearful reaction so well, this quieter moment immediately stands out as one of the film’s highlights.
If you loved Jurassic Park for its sense of wonder, thrilling suspense, and tactile realism, Rebirth just might be the reboot you’ve been waiting for.
The original Jurassic Park has long been hailed as a cinematic masterpiece by many, including myself. When I first saw it in theaters back in 1993, I felt a sense of wonder and amazement unlike anything I had experienced before.
…lacks the dread felt in the original’s historic T-Rex attack…
The Guns of Navarone (1961)
Directed by J. Lee Thompson
influenced Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Themes Visuals Plot
The story was inspired, according to Knoll, by World War II adventure films that had energized Lucas, pictures like The Dam Busters (1955) and The Guns of Navarone (1961).
The action scenes are exhilarating — including a battle on the planet Scarif, idyllic enough to look like it was torn from a Club Med pamphlet, which takes up the entire third act and pays homage to classic war movies like "The Guns of Navarone."
Star Wars took direct inspiration from the behind-enemy-lines "men on a mission" pictures of his youth, like 1955’s The Dam Busters and 1961’s The Guns of Navarone.
Written by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, "Rogue One" harkens back to classic Hollywood war films like "The Guns of Navarone" and "Saving Private Ryan."
It’s not quite “Band of Brothers in Space,” but it does channel a little bit from the likes of “The Guns of Navarone” and “The Dirty Dozen” among others.
The long battle sequence is replete with close shaves, daring escapes, sudden reversals, acts of self-sacrifice and a sudden intervention by friends (no “Star Wars” movie worth its salt would do without plenty of combat between armadas of space ships), but ultimately the entire scenario comes down to a protracted sci-fi version of pictures like “The Guns of Navarone,” in which a ragtag bunch of heroes take on a presumably invincible foe to destroy a weapon of unimaginable magnitude.
Jaws (1975)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), Godzilla (2014), Monsters (2010), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Visuals
…since there’s a long sequence that’s basically the barrel sequence from Jaws…
The scene on the boat where she has to get close to the Mosasaurus is a highlight, and I think it was an intentional nod to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)…
…the Mosasaurus assault on the Delgados plays like an extended, exhilarating Jaws homage (one of a few explicit nods to Spielberg films beyond Jurassic Park).
At times Rebirth, directed by Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One), seems to be speedrunning through the Spielberg filmography, touching on the Jurassics but also Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
This sequence with the massive reptile terrorizing both boats is phenomenal, a la JAWS.
…menacingly swimming like they’re auditioning for Jaws?
The story begins in the Philippines in 1999 (the year after the last Godzilla , directed by Roland Emmerich–a dreadful picture to which this one makes no reference).
Godzilla returns in an installment that's certainly better than Roland Emmerich's disastrous 1998 effort, with the movie's relatively subdued vibe ensuring that the film, at the outset, stands in sharp contrast to most contemporary blockbusters (which are, with few exceptions, overblown and oppressively frenetic).
Godzilla (birth name: Gojira) was such a popular commodity that even the Yanks elected to take a crack at the big guy: The result was 1998's risible Godzilla vs. Ferris Bueller, with the oversized monster no match for Matthew Broderick's shtick.
“Godzilla” climaxes in a welter of expertly staged monster-on-monster action that honors the memory of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 classic Godzilla debut (and its numerous sequels) far more effectively than did Roland Emmerich’s jokey 1998 reboot.
Alien (1979)
Directed by Ridley Scott
influenced Godzilla (2014), Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Visuals Plot
Not the Rancor/Xenomorph kind spliced into Rebirth’s heavily touted, barely featured Distortus rex…
…there's something lurking there that looks like it had some "Alien" Xenomorph DNA added to its mix…
…whose look owes a lot to another franchise, mainly the Xenomorphs from ALIEN…
It’s not a novel creation, just a xenomorph crossed with the Godzilla from Evans’s own 2014 monster movie…
It lifts scenes from both Jaws and Alien without a hint of self-awareness.
…actually, the Alien and Jurassic franchises have a lot of overlap here if one replaces “paleontologist” with “android” and “dinosaurs” with “xenomorph”…
The Dam Busters (1955)
Directed by Michael Anderson
influenced Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Themes Plot
The story was inspired, according to Knoll, by World War II adventure films that had energized Lucas, pictures like The Dam Busters (1955) and The Guns of Navarone (1961).
Star Wars took direct inspiration from the behind-enemy-lines "men on a mission" pictures of his youth, like 1955’s The Dam Busters and 1961’s The Guns of Navarone.
While these are all enjoyable treats, what makes Rogue One such a rewarding watch is that Edwards has given us a romp of a war movie, cut in the mould of 633 Squadron and The Dam Busters .
But the more you settle into the latest entry in Warner Bros. and Legendary's “MonsterVerse” — the Americanized shared universe of Japanese-sourced kaiju movies that started with 2014's Godzilla — the more confounding this exercise becomes.
On the plus side, Wingard has arguably three of the best working actors in the game: Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry reprise their roles from “Godzilla vs. Kong,” and Wingard brings along the star of his 2014 thriller “The Guest,” Dan Stevens, who possesses a kind of glowing charisma that's almost too much to take in.
2014's Godzilla, 2017's Kong: Skull Island and 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters seesawed in their efforts (some admirably, some woefully).
Jedha Kyber Erso should come with the warning that this episode will immediately make you want to put on Rogue One.
One of the greatest strengths of Rogue One and Andor has been showing the gritty, grimy dirty work of forming a rebellion capable of defeating a tyrannical monster.
Saw’s part in this batch of episodes is the one that feels most like a bit of business leading into Rogue One.
In an echo of the opening of Rogue One, this peaceful and quiet life is interrupted by the arrival of an Imperial ship conducting an unexpected audit.
As series creator Tony Gilroy has said all along, Andor Season 2 Chapter 4 takes viewers right up to where we first met Cassian in Rogue One, and it has been such a pleasure to watch him grow over the course of two seasons.
…his panic in the face of a cooler-headed, harder-hearted spy paralleling a similar scene at the beginning of Rogue One. (Only Rogue One did actually show Cass doing the job.)
Though it pays “creative homage” to a number of films (the opening credits sequence is practically lifted from the 2014 version of Godzilla ), it owes its biggest debts to Alien , Aliens , and the collected works of Paul W.S. Anderson, the sci-fi deathtrap B-movie maestro behind Event Horizon and the Resident Evil films .
Following up on his 2014 brainteaser The Signal , William Eubank's Underwater lets viewers know what they're in for from the start: If its title treatment's faint echo of Alien doesn't tip you off (with letters materializing onscreen out of order against a ghostly expanse), a credits sequence heavy on newspaper-headline exposition may remind you of recent Godzilla reboots, in which humanity's hubris awakened terrible creatures from the deep.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Alien , Aliens , The Abyss , Leviathan , The Meg , Godzilla (2014), The Thing , Gravity , shaky-cam found-footage stuff like Cloverfield , not Citizen Kane .
The film opens with a 2014 Godzilla -esque title credits sequence which also gives us 87% of the film’s exposition about a drill site 5 miles down in the ocean and introduces us to the Tian Corporation behind it all.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced Monsters (2010), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Themes Plot
It’s like the Marines stormed Tarawa only to find Imperial Walkers in waiting, or “Apocalypse Now” with X-wings instead of Hueys blasting from overhead.
After watching Monsters a second time with that in mind, I liked the film much better—and found it also evoked Apocalypse Now (1979) and possibly a less benign The African Queen (1951).
The first sound is of a marine humming Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, Apocalypse Now-style, as they barrel along the Pan-American Highway, and Andrew and Sam’s river journey clearly references the same movie.
The river journey, like the one in " Apocalypse Now ," often goes smoothly enough, but there's always the invisible threat in the jungle.
It covers the spectrum, too, sampling bits of “It Happened One Night,” “Apocalypse Now,” “District 9” and “Before Sunrise,” all set to a sci-fi beat that you can dance to – if you have the patience.
Like Apocalypse Now much of Monsters’ running time is taken up by a long boat trip up a winding river.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Godzilla (2014), Monsters (2010)
Visuals Plot Characters
The movie borrows from Steven Spielberg's " Jaws ," " Close Encounters of the Third Kind " and " War of the Worlds ," as well as from earlier popcorn classics that shaped Spielberg.
Where the 1998 Godzilla borrowed heavily (and clumsily) from Jurassic Park , particularly in its middle act, Edwards occasionally looks back to the Spielberg of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind , with a particular fondness for slow camera movements that reveal first a little, then a lot of an awe-inspiring spectacle.
The opening sections, featuring an archaeological dig in the Philippines and the coverup of the events surrounding an earthquake in Japan, owe a debt to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Bryan Cranston sinks his teeth into what I’m calling the Richard Dreyfuss Close Encounters of the Third Kind role — the guy who knows something big and ominous is coming to the planet, and yet no one will listen to him.
Instead of revealing his hand right from the start and then trying to top himself a la Transformers or Pacific Rim, Edwards makes you wait for the good stuff, teasing you along the way with crumbs but keeping his main attraction offscreen until the second half (Spielberg is an obvious influence here, specifically Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
Cranston’s slightly crazed, obsessed, gloriously overacting scientist dad rings of Richard Dreyfuss’s mashed potato sculpting kook in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Cloverfield (2008)
Directed by Matt Reeves
influenced Monsters (2010), Godzilla (2014), Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
Visuals
…a “Distortus Rex” (which looks like a T-Rex mixed with the monster from Cloverfield)…
…the Cloverfield monster’s general physique…
…the latter of which has slightly longer arms, an H.R. Giger cranium, a Predator’s maw and the Cloverfield monster’s general physique.
His giddy inventiveness rivals the stark grandiosity of 2008's " Cloverfield " while offering up exceptionally photorealistic creature designs that nonetheless manage to pay loving homage to the Japanese features of generations' past.
But rather than harken back to the aesthetic of Godzilla’s traditional adversaries—Rodan, Mothra, etc.—the MUTOs are exactly the kind of oddly-jointed grotesqueries that have been in such vogue more recently, from Starship Troopers to Cloverfield to Pacific Rim.
Gareth Edwards' 2014 "Godzilla" takes its cues from that great sequence, and from the 1954 original's Hiroshima-and-Nagasaki inspired tracking shot past a row of bloodied hospital patients, and the camcordered immediacy of " Cloverfield ," and the gas station sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," and the Do Lung Bridge sequence of " Apocalypse Now ," in which American soldiers' enemies were portrayed as faraway shadows, shooting flares and yelling obscenities.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)
Directed by Michael Dougherty
influenced by Godzilla (2014), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Monsters (2010)
So is “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” but Gareth Edwards, who directed the first film (and went on to make “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” one of the rare artistic knockouts in the “Star Wars” franchise), didn’t stick around to direct this one.
Not that we were exactly holding our collective breath over it, but our favourite Japanese big-screen monster and good close personal friend Godzilla has returned in what is thankfully a much better throwaway, FX-driven epic than that 2014 mess directed by Gareth Edwards ( Star Wars: Rogue One ).
Edwards left the franchise to direct Star Wars: Rogue One, and screenwriter Michael Dougherty took over.
Edwards went on to make Rogue One .
“Rogue One” director Gareth Edwards’s 2014 “Godzilla” was a slow-moving but well-made drama that effectively built up an expanded creature universe.
Originally, Edwards was supposed to direct the sequel but his work on Rogue One kept him too busy.
Pacific Rim (2013)
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
influenced Godzilla (2014), Monsters (2010)
Themes Plot Characters Visuals
The second half of “Godzilla’’ is definitely more fun than the first part of a film I enjoyed overall, if less than last year’s similar dip into giant monster blockbusterdom, “Pacific Rim.”
The picture becomes a grimier, humorless version of last summer's "Pacific Rim" at that point, when the roaring, stomping and clashing beasts at skyscraper heights demolish the people on the ground in both a literal and a figurative sense.
In “Godzilla” (2014), Dr. Ichiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe), a more solemn version of Charlie Day’s kaiju fanboy in last year’s “Pacific Rim,” gives the movie’s director, Gareth Edwards, the best advice he could get.
The new-school Godzilla is a majestic, massive beast with bulk and power in every step; using motion-capture and good judgment, Edwards and his effects team make a film that’s quantum leaps above and beyond the silly, Power-Rangers-on-steroids shallowness of the hard-to-endure “Pacific Rim.”
By comparison, Gareth Edwards’ 2010 DIY feature “Monsters” featured a similar invasion of colossal aliens, but deepened the premise by using it to explore post-catastrophe trauma and complicated the very idea of the invaders as legitimate bad guys.
District 9 (2009)
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
influenced Monsters (2010), The Creator (2023)
Plot Themes Visuals
So far, so very “District 9.’’ “Monsters,’’ though, focuses on two young Americans thrown together as they head for the US border: Sam (Whitney Able), the level-headed daughter of a powerful media tycoon, and Andrew (Scoot McNairy), a photographer for one of her dad’s magazines who reluctantly agrees to get baby girl out of the country.
The film also has the misfortune of coming in the wake of Cloverfield and District 9, which were much bigger and more accomplished renderings of similar ideas.
Much like 2009?s District 9, aliens end up stranded on our planet.
In case anyone misses that this very poor relation of "District 9" -- lamely acted and slackly directed by special-effects specialist Gareth Edwards -- is an allegory about immigration, a character looking at the border fence tells us that "it's different looking at America from the outside."
With its indie vibe and ingenious effects, Monsters is more than a little remindful of District 9, though the 2009 South African sleeper had a sense of humor about it; Monsters, in the end, is bleak business.
Unfortunately for Edwards, Neill Blomkamp also spun a low budget into monster/sci-fi magic with District 9, but in addition to a similar theme, his South African counterpart also had a terrifically strong script and compelling performances.
His film is more in the vein of Robert Wise’s 1963 The Haunting than Cloverfield – which could be a problem commercially.
Is it the “random rich family in peril” story from the eminently forgettable Jurassic Park III?
…with ideas borrowed from “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” “Jurassic Park III,” and “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,”…
…you have a pretty good idea what happens next if you’ve seen any Jurassic movie…
…the marooned family subplot is less impactful than the marooned family in Jurassic Park III.
…the plastic jungle of Jurassic Park III…
Spielberg returned to direct the sequel “The Lost World” but not the third film, “Jurassic Park III”.
Avatar (2009)
Directed by James Cameron
influenced The Creator (2023), Godzilla (2014)
Visuals Themes
To compare Edwards’ work in The Creator to one of the greats, he achieves the same level of world-building that James Cameron managed with Avatar.
Much as in James Cameron’s Avatar films, the U.S. military is presented as fearsome, ruthless, and largely immoral; it creates a terrifying orbital platform named NOMAD that circles the skies, dropping gigantic bombs on targets near and far.
As in James Cameron's “Avatar,” the villains here are the growling warmongers who can't see that their adversaries have souls.
…the problem is that the script (by Edwards and Chris Weitz, who also worked on "Rogue One") never follows through on the deeper or more complex ideas it brings up, and overly simplifies its conflict and the people involved. This results in a predictable and dumbed-down story that feels like Edwards doing James Cameron's "Avatar" in terms of presenting bold worldbuilding and sci-fi ideas, but without the emotional resonance of that giant film.
Where the lush planet Pandora of James Cameron’s Avatar felt distant and fantastical, like a Roger Dean painting, The Creator’s patinated vision feels like a place you could reach out and touch.
In terms of addressing contemporary geopolitics, the film falls into exactly the same trap as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009): the USA are depicted as aggressive colonial invaders, while the blended civilisation of humans and robots in the so-named “New Asia” are blurred into an anonymous and actively colonialist “other”.
Like Kevin McCarthy in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which matched Gojira as a vibrant Cold War parable in sci-fi garb, he is the lone sane man in a world myopic to the truth; his research got him a serious prison term.
…in an amusing Final Destination-ish prologue…
…the cold open, which includes a Final Destination-like mishap…
…perhaps a fitting end for a business that, in an amusing Final Destination-ish prologue, cannot protect its people even from errant candy wrappers.
It all starts promisingly enough, with a genuinely creepy opening, only marred slightly by the Final Destination-esque contrivance that leads to the genetically mutated dinosaurs escaping.