Sydney is under attack in the final trailer for Bryan Singer's big-budget X-Men: Apocalypse.
The original mutant, Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac), has vowed to wipe the stain of corrupt humanity from the face of the Earth.
"Everything they have built will fall," he proclaims, "and from the ashes of their world, we'll build a better one."
Clearly, this millennia-old self-appointed judge of all that is right and wrong with the place is no fan of the work of Jorn Utzon, because no sooner has he said that than the sails of the Bennelong landmark are torn to shreds.
There have been several trailers and teasers for the much-hyped follow-up to the second-most successful film in Fox's X-Men franchise, 2014's Days of Future Past, which marked director Singer's return to the series he initiated in 2000 and took $US748 million ($969 million) at the global box office.
(Deadpool, which is technically an X-Men story but sits slightly to the left of the main series, is the most successful, having topped $US760 million [$985 million].)
In the new film, Apocalypse – who has also been known by the names Ra, Krishna and Yahweh (as we learned in an earlier trailer) – has woken up grumpy after a long slumber.
Angel, one of the four horsemen of Apocalypse.
He recruits four mutant "horsemen" to his cause: Psylocke (Olivia Munn), who has telepathic powers and the ability to harness energy in the form of a powerful blade; Storm (Alexandra Shipp), who can control the weather; Angel (Ben Hardy), a winged mutant who has, well, wings; and Magneto (Michael Fassbender), the sometime ally of X-Men leader Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) but no stranger to the lure of the dark side.
This is not the first time Sydney has come under attack on film. Guillermo Del Toro destroyed parts of the city in his 2013 monster-mech movie Pacific Rim, and the Harbour Bridge was spectacularly destroyed in the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
In the low-budget sci-fi telemovie Supernova (2005) the city came under attack from a meteor shower.
Even further back, the harbour city was nothing but a dusty ruin inhabited by children at the end of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
But while those movies may have fantasised about destroying Sydney, its annihilation will never have looked so real, or so impressive, as it likely will in Singer's hands.
X-Men Apocalypse opens on May 27.
