In the latest trailer for Godzilla (check it out at the bottom of this post), Ken Watanabe’s character, Dr. Serizawa, warns, “The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around.”

Cities have been reduced to ash. Skyscrapers are crumbling. Planes are falling from the sky. Flooding is rampant. Yet somehow the military has been able to convince the masses that the destruction is the result of natural disasters. But not everyone is fooled. Nuclear physicist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is convinced that some thing is behind the recent devastation.

“It was not an earthquake. It wasn’t a typhoon. They’re lying! I’m not crazy,” Brody says. “Whatever it is, they are guarding so carefully, I need to be able to prove that it is real.”

The trailer doesn’t give us a good view of the monster, but we can tell Godzilla is gargantuan. Flares that citizens set off into the sky only manage to reach the monster’s midsection!

Also starring in the movie are Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn, Sally Hawkins and Richard T. Jones. The reboot is director Gareth Edwards’ first major film. His independent flick Monsters was well received when it was released in 2010.

In an interview with Popular Mechanics about Godzilla, Edwards identified the Japanese film Akira as a source of inspiration, saying “We pulled all our favorite moments from Akira and had this library of reference, so whenever we got stuck, or we ever felt like a sequence wasn’t inspired enough, or we didn’t know exactly how to give it that edge to make it feel as epic as we could, we would always thumb through the Akira imagery and suddenly get a wave of excitement or a new direction.”

Godzilla will hit theaters May 16, 2014, in 2D and 3D.