Godzilla (1998)

If the original Gojira is a fantastic piece of film making and the Americanization is a cleverly made adaptation for a different cultural audience, Roland Emmerich's 1998 version Godzilla is - for lack of anything more apt - a heaping pile of horse shit. Look, there's just no other way around it. It's not a good movie; it's especially not a good version of Godzilla.

Thing is though: it starts off seeming like it will be! Like the original, it opens with a Japanese fishing boat on the high seas getting attacked by Godzilla. Though there are a few notable differences (namely that in the original, they don't show you any element of Godzilla whereas this shows you teeth and a tail, which makes the mystery more intriguing in the original). Also, the special effects in the opening shot are awesome.

But after opening up with a somewhat dark sequence, it immediately jumps to a stupid joke. Immediately following the scene wherein all but one die, we cut to the introduction of scientist Nick Tatopoulos (a miscast Matthew Broderick), wearing headphones while driving in the rain - singing "Singing in the Rain," of course - while he goes to study the effects of nuclear radiation on earthworms in Chernobyl. As he is almost mindlessly conducting his tests - all the while singing in the rain - a helicopter lands behind him to take him away. As it turns out, Godzilla has reached land and they are bringing Tatopoulos in to help.

Ok, not so terrible so far. In fact, when we get to the site where Godzilla reached land, it too feels a bit (though only a small amount so) like the original. We see villagers surrounding evidence of the giant creature - including a washed up, totally wrecked ship and a bunch of footprints - we see other scientists studying the evidence. There's even a brief nod (sort of) to the original where Tatopoulos can't figure out where the evidence is, only to realize that he is standing in a footprint.

It becomes increasingly clear by watching Roland Emmerich movies that Emmerich really is not a big fan of military personnel, as he always writes them in hyper unrealistic fashions. I like Kevin Dunn as much as the next guy, but he is not a great candidate for playing Army Colonel Hicks - in charge of the military's hunt for Godzilla. Additionally, the character of Sergeant O'Neal exists only for comedic relief in a movie that itself is nothing but.

Hicks and O'Neal aren't even the worst of the crappy, annoyingly unrealistic characters. The worst offenders are the inclusion of Mayor Ebert and his sidekick adviser Gene (get it?? Emmerich is soooo clever). Their childlike, cartoonish nature feels like an inside joke from Emmerich (since it is), but never quite lets you in on it.  Then of course, you get half the cast of The Simpsons in the movie with Harry Shearer playing the sleazy, jerk reporter and Hank Azaria playing the brave, but stupid news cameraman.

The cast tells you exactly what you need to know: this movie exists solely as a vehicle for jokes. This is not a problem if this movie were an adaptation of an older comedy, but it was supposed to be America's take on Japan's nuclear allegory. It was America's take on the dark nature of a beast who represented Japan's anxieties and fears. And America hired a German director to make fun of it. Awesome.

Why???!?

And the actors aren't even that great in their comedic efforts! Azaria is amusing as usual, but the movie plays as one giant confirmation of the New York stereotype. Meanwhile, the military and government are depicted as bumbling idiots in all the wrong ways. Sure, the dialogue is truly a disaster on an Emmerichian scale, but the actors also sound stiff - as if they are literally just reading it off of a card! If you told me that Matthew Broderick read the script prior to five minutes before the shoot, I would not believe you at all. And it's a shame because in a movie centered around a giant monster running through New York City, the ONE thing they could have gotten realistically was the characters. And they missed. Badly.

That is the huge problem with the movie: everything is just a set up to some crappy joke. The following sums up exactly this issue: from the very beginning, they refer to Godzilla as male. It's always, "He's found a good hiding place!" "He's found a good food supply." "He...he...he." Then, randomly, Tatopoulos decides to run a pregnancy test (as, ya know, you do when you're convinced something is definitely male), and of course, it comes back positive. Turns out, "he's" pregnant. They have this entire five minute scene talking about it and explaining it. The entire time, you're wondering, "How did they know it was a he in the first place? If you're going to make the creature pregnant, why not just simply make the beast a female so you don't have to try to over explain anything?" Indeed! But then you miss this gem: Tatopoulos explains Godzilla is pregnant and reproduces asexually (apparently, Godzillas are "born pregnant" he later explains). This of course prompts the allegedly funny line, "Where's the fun in that?"

No piece of the movie quite captures the shitty writing quite like this scene. Here, we have an overly complicated piece of unnecessary science fiction exposition that was completely and totally avoidable for the SOLE PURPOSE OF MAKING A CRAPPY JOKE. That happens all the time in this movie! Even during Godzilla's initial rampage in the city, where we see people getting stomped on and crushed in cars - dark stuff if you really watch it - we are interrupted by an annoying scene with Shearer on the phone looking for a story. His assistant sees Godzilla pass in the background and nervously points out that his story just walked by. Shearer turns around - just missing Godzilla's head pass the building - sees nothing, then turns back as if his assistant is crazy. Then, Godzilla's tail passes the building.

Even the badass characters of the French Legion - headed by the only good element of this movie in Jean Reno - often break character for bad jokes wherein they mock American coffee and do Elvis impressions to get by military personnel (again showing the incompetence of the military in the wrong ways). Everything to Emmerich is just one big joke.

On the one hand, it makes total sense. Americans prior to that point had never truly seen the original Japanese movie, so in a lot of their minds, that's exactly what Godzilla was: a big joke. Still, the film makers did have access to the original piece and never seemed to pick up on the blatantly heavy and dark tones and themes of it. Instead, they watered it down so much that what you got was...well, straight up water! They couldn't even get the action right, really. Here's a movie about a giant lizard attacking a city. So what did Emmerich do? He decided to make the pivotal action sequence happen with smaller, baby Godzillas. In a movie about a giant monster, Emmerich decided to shrink the scale. Instead of getting more, epic Godzilla rampages, we got a Jurassic Park style chase sequence featuring large velociraptors chasing an out of shape Broderick and Reno.

What? Even if you stripped Godzilla of all his layers and allegorical connections, no one in any capacity watches Godzilla movies for small scale action sequences!

The only other thing worth touching upon is the design of Godzilla. My feeling about it is that I actually do think I like the design of the creature, but not for "Godzilla." If this had been a generic monster movie, I would have really liked it. But what they did was change Godzilla from this giant, lumbering symbol of death and destruction - something that was hulking and slow, but inevitable - into this quick and agile animal. Sure, maybe you feel a little bit more for the creature when it is defeated in the end, but that connection comes at the cost of any possible deeper meaning.

It's kind of funny. The legendary Ray Harryhausen often talked smack against Honda and co. for ripping off his movie The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Except when you go back and watch those two movies, there are only surface level similarities. Gojira is so much deeper, so much darker, so much more layered, and so much more profound than Beasts.  Essentially, Honda took The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and turned it into Godzilla. Then Roland Emmerich took Godzilla and turned it back into The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

What gets especially frustrating is that in the special features on the blu-ray, one of the dudes was talking about how he felt this was true to the source material (which already pisses you off if you liked the original). He also goes on to say that he felt like only now and only in America did the technology exist to make Godzilla in the way that the original creators "intended." This further proves that the makers of 1998's shitfest of an "adaptation" had no idea what the point was.

Still, as a giant Godzilla fan, it is important in Godzilla's history. The entire point of Toho's selling the rights to Sony was to pass the torch. They felt that they had gone as far as they could with the character. Plus in Japan, Hollywood had long been more successful at the box office than domestic films. Yet after seeing that movie, Toho quickly responded by putting out Godzilla 2000 less than a year after the release! And then they made several more before finally retiring the beast again. So on one hand, this movie was a complete shitfest - not even just as a Godzilla movie, but as a movie in general. Yet on the other hand, we wouldn't have gotten those seven other Japanese Godzilla movies without it. (They even make fun of it.)

The movie is good if you hate decent dialogue, hate scripts that make sense and don't try to get convoluted, hate decent, fleshed out characters, like cheesy romance stories, or like terrible jokes. But then really, "Where's the fun in that?"



Related: I'm not sayin' Godzilla: Final Wars was a good Godzilla movie (in fact, it's my least favorite in the entire Japanese franchise), but it is a little bit worth it for this:





I don't remember, but I think after the fight, the angry dude says something like, "I knew that fish-eating monster was useless!"

Indeed.