Godzilla Review
by Edward Champion (edchamp AT slip DOT net)May 26th, 1998
MOVIE REVIEW: GODZILLA
RATING: *1/2 (out of four stars)
Review by Edward Champion
PREFATORY WARNING FOR CHEESEPHILES: GODZILLA is a movie that does NOT contain cheese, nor is it an homage or tribute to the original Japanese GODZILLA movies. If the sole reason you are going to see GODZILLA is the cheese, you will find nothing there except bad jokes, a sleekly designed monster that resembles a reject CG Tyrannosaurus Rex model from I LM, and essentially a fourth-rate ripoff of Spielberg's JURASSIC PARK movies.
* * *
I must admit that I am a Godzilla fan. When I was growing up, I was in front of the television every week like clockwork. My little legs would race off to watch the Saturday afternoon matinee and the local station would play all of the Japanese imports from Toho, Inc.
Gamera. Mothra. Ghidrah. Gigan. Megalon. But most of all, Godzilla.
All of them were my childhood pals. Giant monsters created by guys in monster suits constantly menacing Tokyo. I always wondered how they managed to rebuild Tokyo so fast in between movies, but what did I care?
Even back then, I knew that the special effects were tacky and that there was no way any of these monsters could possibly develop from radiation.
But that was part of the fun. You had to admire the way the Toho films tried to tell a story with limited resources, even though it could never happen. There was a certain magic to it all, and the bad dubbing gave the films a little extra character. Maybe it was an early sympathy I had for low-budget filmmakers, I don't know.
So when I heard that Roland Emmerich was finally going to helm the big-budget GODZILLA project that had been in turnaround for years, I was at first a bit skeptical. This was the man who had conned us into seeing such tripe as STARGATE and INDEPENDENCE DAY, who shamelessly recycled successful science fiction movies and turned them into money-makers with a certain degree of cheese on the side.
But then I actually considered for the moment that Emmerich might be the right guy for the job and that the studio execs were playing Emmerich for a fool. Emmerich had, after all, stooped to the lowest common denominator with INDEPENDENCE DAY and some of the self-conscious cheese within it had managed to work.
It made perfect sense. Give the film to a shamelessly awful filmmaker and he would recapture the glory of Toho.
Of course, I neglected to remember the previous attempt to squeeze revenue from Godzilla on Yankee shores, the Japanese-American co-production, GODZILLA 1985. I remember seeing that film when I was eleven and, even at that early age, I felt conned. Still, I had the old Toho films to make up for it.
But when the ingenious marketing campaign began for GODZILLA ("His foot is as long as this bus"), common sense was thrown out the window. I needed my fix of GODZILLA, dammit, $100 million production or no. So I planned out the cinematic pilgrimage with equally zealous compadres for opening night.
I couldn't have been more disappointed.
GODZILLA is a film that is EVEN DUMBER than INDPENDENCE DAY. So inept is the writing, so devoid is the script of any kind of fun, and so misguided is the direction that it makes one wonder if Emmerich will have a future if GODZILLA does not gross more than $100 million domestically.
For one thing, Godzilla is only in about thirty minutes of this interminable two hour and twenty minute piece of crapola. The Toho films never kept you hanging for so long and, even when they did, you got such wacky characters as the twin girls or the interesting bureaucratic figures trying to unite against the monsters.
The characters in this film are more derivative than a really bad episode of PAULY. Matthew Broderick plays a nuclear biologist who's into earthworms, noting their increased length amidst radiation. Suddenly, he's called to investigate Godzilla's escape off of an island, a French nuclear test site (the French recently started testing nuclear bombs last year, but then I guess Emmerich and co-writer Devlin don't read the newspapers).
Meanwhile, Broderick's ex-girlfriend Lucy (Arabella Field) is trying to pursue a career as a reporter, despite the control and lust of her boss, TV anchorman Charles Caiman (Harry Shearer). (As an aside, ain't it funny that we've had two blockbuster movies in a row (DEEP IMPACT being the other one) with the contrived Career Woman Gets Ahead subplot. But I digress…)
As you might guess, Godzilla arrives in the now overused city of New York to wreck havoc and destroy notable landmarks. (This time around, it's the Chrysler Building and the Brooklyn Bridge.)
One of the main problems with this movie is that Emmerich and Devlin take this movie too seriously, not going for the cheese like they should. Godzilla as a whole is rarely seen. We see his tail crashing into buildings. His feet smash onto cars. But very rarely is his entire frame seen. Part of the joy of the Toho films was seeing a full profile of Godzilla smashing into obviously artificial models of cities and landmarks. Very rarely did you see anyone get hurt.
But Emmerich goes for the graphic approach here. Godzilla is not the sympathetic figure that he was in before and he shows no mercy in annihilating people. He's also more crafty, able to maliciously cause harm by dodging heat-seeking missiles and deliberately allowing them to kill. In the Toho films, Godzilla was sort of a clumsy monster, but ultimately he didn't mean any harm unless you really pissed him off. He had the sympathy of the people, often stopping to fight monsters that posed an even greater threat to Earth.
But even more horrifying is the slipshod design Emmerich has created. When Godzilla is fully revealed (after forty-five minutes of mindless prattling amongst one-dimensional characters), he is a sleek CG model with a cruel face that resembles more of a Tyrannosaurus Rex than a goofy lizard.
That sure as hell isn't the Godzilla I remember.
In fact, the few moments that are fun in this movie don't even involve Godzilla at all. Midway through the film, Godzilla creates a nest of eggs in Madison Square Garden. Inevitably, they hatch and, while seeing the baby lizards run around is interesting to a point, the sequence heavily plagiarizes the raptor pursuit in the final moments of JURASSIC PARK. As a further Spielberg ripoff, Emmerich constantly has the swinging flashlight routine going on.
The real question you have to ask yourself before you see this movie is whether you want to spend eight bucks on a movie that is clearly not inspired from its source or to rent exemplars of the source itself. It's just that bad.
One wonders what Jan De Bont could have done with this material had he been allowed to stay on. Any other director would have embraced the B-movie legend rather than reinvent it with all the ingenuity of a thieving cocker spaniel. But then this is Hollywood. Spare no expense, to quote Emmerich's latest source of plagiarism.
But I guess Hollywood doesn't seem to understand these sort of things. Sometimes, they've got a good thing going without any money at all.
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