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Godzilla (1998)

Rating: 2 out of 10

The biggest of the radioactive reptiles is back!

Godzilla, the great beast spawned from a series of nuclear tests has moved away from its established fascination with destroying Japan and this time...it’s come to New York, New York.

Produced by the team who brought you the weak big-budget hits Stargate (1995) and Independence Day (1996), one expects little more than a spectacular display of special effects wizardry and heart-thumping action sequences when walking into Godzilla (1998), and that’s exactly what one receives.

Certainly, the film is entertaining in a kitsch sort of way. Thankfully, Emmerich and Devlin opted for a light-hearted comic edge that, at times, presents the film as an intelligent, self-reflexive genre piece. Unfortunately, these comic moments are interspersed with long periods of ho-hum dialogue and characters so clichéd that you can almost mouth each character’s dialogue before they say it.

Matthew Broderick plays, well, Matthew Broderick. Of course, Devlin and Emmerich have given him a name and a profession – Chernobyl worm expert Dr. Nick Tatopoulos. He is a sensitive, undervalued scientist whose theories regarding Godzilla’s mutation and purpose in New York are largely ignored. Maria Pitillo plays Audrey Timmonds, the career-minded journalist who was Broderick’s college sweetheart, and so begins the inevitable dimensionless love interest. While Maria outshines Broderick at times, her performance is more suited to an evening soap than to a feature film of this type. Of course, there is also a die-hard cameraman (Hank Azaria), a trigger-happy military Colonel (Kevin Dunn) and an exploitative television anchorman (Harry Shearer), all of which have been reduced to cartoonish stereotypes. The only characters with something to say are the leader of the French Secret Service, Philippe Roache, played expertly by The Professional’s (1994) Jean Reno and the comic-relief pair Mayor Ebert (Michael Lerner) and his companion Gene (Lorry Goldman), who parody film critics Siskel and Ebert. It always surprises me that Hollywood can produce films like Alien Resurrection (1998) on a $90 million budget and Godzilla on a budget of $160 million, without placing due emphasis to the process of creating effective characters.

The most ineffective element of Godzilla, however, is its lack of social commentary and political satire. The original Godzilla, or Gojira (1954), can be seen as a metaphysical incarnation of the atomic threat and anxiety related to Cold War politics, spawned by the Japanese in reaction to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Godzilla’s radioactive origin and his devastating breath of fire have been used as nothing more than plot devices in this latest incarnation of the immortal tale. Certainly, in the context of a recent burst of nuclear paranoia, stimulated by childish weapons tests conducted in India and Pakistan, the film could have been presented as a powerful anti-war piece had its subject matter been treated with more respect.

The beast itself, not so much a monster as a big, clumsy parent who fails to look where it is treading, could have been treated as a King Kong-like victim of circumstance rather than a threat to the gung-ho American way of life. A few seconds of sensitivity on behalf of Broderick’s character do little to arouse the emotions. In terms of the monster’s appearance, it looks fantastic. Certainly, though, while the CGI effects are impressive, they are nothing new. Godzilla moves like a scaly T-Rex, while its children look and move like The Lost World’s (1997) velociraptors.

While Godzilla is perhaps the most spectacular and complex movie monster of its type, Emmerich and Devlin have used the mega-lizard as little more than an epic money-making device in this case. This film certainly had the potential to be something really special, but is ultimately presented as nothing more than typical Hollywood fare, or worse. Certainly, the film is packed full of mind-blowing special effects and thrilling action sequences that should be viewed on the big screen, though for an event movie of its scale, there’s too much tacky dialogue and not enough spectacle. The film runs in excess of 130 minutes, with the inevitable plateaus and troughs. If it were cut by twenty minutes or so, Godzilla could be a must-see motion picture. As it stands, the film’s shallow attempts at character development and its slick, faultless (amidst the constant rain and darkness, at least) special effects do nothing to cover up the holes in its script.

While the original Godzilla and its numerous Godzilla vs... sequels were technologically tacky (the new Godzilla doesn’t look like a man in a rubber suit trampling a selection of cardboard buildings), they effectively confronted the era’s distrust of science and its sense of nuclear paranoia. Many of them were even well written, while the same cannot be said for the Emmerich and Devlin version.

As indicated without subtlety in the closing seconds of Godzilla, plans have already begun for two sequels. Let's hope Columbia-TriStar have the sense to employ a decent scriptwriter to pen the remainder of the trilogy.

Review written by Joshua Smith, 1998.

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