"Uh oh, that guy looks really injured! Impressive."

"Yeah, he's doing much better than those ladies, they're overdoing it with the limping."

It is a perfectly mild and sunny summer day in Vancouver and Yahoo Movies has happened upon a group of bruised and battered individuals slowly extracting themselves from a pile of rubble which used to resemble a building. No, we're not cruelly making light of a dire situation, we're watching the second unit on Gareth Edwards' "Godzilla" capture one of many aftermath scenes in which a 400-foot creature has laid waste to his surroundings.

That there is plenty of large-scale destruction in the film should be encouraging for fans of the original monster movies. As we learned on the set, up-and-coming director Edwards ("Monsters") and his leading men Bryan Cranston ("Breaking Bad") and Aaron Taylor Johnson ("Kick-Ass") clearly want to stay true to the character's mythos, while also exploring new territory.

Here are eight more things we learned on set of this new monster mash:

1. Don't Call It A Comeback (Or Prequel)

"It is an origin story, Edwards said. "It's not about having seen another film to understand this movie. It's supposed to be the beginning. But it doesn't just take place in modern times. There are other aspects to it."

Those "other aspects" include a story grounded in reality with an emotional core. We kept hearing a "Close Encounters"-Meets-"Black Hawk Down" comparison thrown around.

"For me, a monster movie just for the sake of being a monster movie can kind of become a pointless exercise," Edwards said. "So it's about finding the right symbolism in what he represents and trying to find a storyline that expresses that. And I'm really pleased with the playground we're playing in because I think it's very much on theme."

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2. There Will Be Death and Destruction, Natch



Going back to the aforementioned post-Godzilla attack scene, there will be a lot of those in the movie. While touring the production's "war room," in which they have on display key art, 3D models, and storyboards, we saw plenty of monstrous destruction that takes places all over the world. The film's multiple settings include Japan, the United States, the Philippines, and Marshall Islands.

But it's not destruction for destruction's sake.

"It's real but it's not gratuitous," said producer Mary Parent. "It's not like there's any softening. You'll feel the reality of the situation and you do see people that die but I don't think we'll have any trouble with our rating. People do die but you don't see Godzilla step on a kid or anything. There's a lot of monster action, too, and ... there are other creatures."

[Related: 'Godzilla' Poster Reveals the Biggest-Ever King of the Monsters]

3. Godzilla vs. ?

Speaking of those other creatures, we know they're in the film, we just don't know what they are exactly.

"I'm not sure what I can and cannot say, but it was really important that we didn't do a Godzilla movie where it wasn't just one creature," Edwards explained. "Because you can quickly run out of people pointlessly trying to fire upon and stop [this thing], which is why Toho movies were always [Godzilla] versus something else, and the whole franchise or whatever you want to call it was involved in the creatures. So when you get into it, you have to make that choice that you mentioned and we made a choice. Without giving too much away, it's not as simple as that. It's not as simplistic as 'Is there a good or a bad?'"

4. Man vs. Nature

So who created the monster? Us or them or Mother Nature? Edwards said that one of the strongest themes in the film is the exploration of those ideas.

"There are definitely very strong themes that hark back to the original 1954 'Godzilla,'" Edwards said. "It's the "Man v. Nature that comes through a lot, it's a recurring theme on the set today the way that nature always wins. You can't control nature. When we start thinking we can control nature, that's when it all starts to go wrong. And that happens a lot in our movie. You see it quite a bit, that is our arrogance always comes back to bite us."