Review: Godzilla (1998)

Let’s rewind once more back to 1998.

This was the time of insanely hyped blockbusters with the most extravagant marketing campaigns possible, where the opening titles inevitably exploded and flew like Concordes past the viewer. You can probably pinpoint Jurassic Park as the starting point for this trend, but where that film used its breakthroughs in special effects and blockbuster filmmaking in a classy and precise way, successors used them more like a cocaine addict at a rave thumping their heads on a high to bright colors and over the top music. I’ve talked about such examples as Armageddon, but alongside Bays and Bruckheimers, there was also Roland Emmerich riding this wave.

Emmerich is one of those European directors, like say Luc Besson, that defies the usual stigmas against Hollywood there, deciding that yes, it is in fact great to just blow shit up in front of a camera. His first big break came with 1994’s Stargate—looking back on it, it’s a passable silly scifi flick about ancient aliens and galactic portals, but not much more than that. It’s the television franchise it launched that’s what really stuck, although you can see the beginnings of Emmerich’s staples with this one, such as nerdy protagonists with glasses, and a portrayal of the US military that veers between fawning and insulting.

His next big one was a little film called Independence Day. And for a film aspiring to be the ultimate popcorn experience…yeah, it actually succeeded at that. It’s a combination of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum’s charisma, alongside some genuinely spectacular special effects that combined great modelwork and CGI, that made it one of the truly epic blockbusters of the 90s. Is the story as silly as a penguin in a clown suit? Oh sure. Are the aliens complete dorks for being defeated by a Macbook? Undoubtedly. But dammit, it’s so sincere in its silliness and scope that I can’t help but put on a big guilty pleasure cheesy grin watching it.

However, it can also be argued that Emmerich’s career kind of peaked there. You see, TriStar Pictures had a few years back acquired the rights to a remake of Toho’s city-toppling pioneering kaiju classic, the 1954 Ishiro Honda Godzilla. Scripts and designs were made—and it was actually a reasonably cool screenplay, involving shape-changing abominations from outer space and city-destroying battles. Unfortunately, TriStar would put it on hold for budget concerns…before eventually handing it off to Emmerich, fresh from Independence Day, who would in time need an even larger budget. You know, as you do.

And with that, Emmerich decided that he wanted to do ‘his own take’ on the king of the monsters, supposedly ‘more realistic’. He started off with redesigning Toho’s stocky muscle mountain of an atomic mofo with a skinny giant-chinned lizard with a very horizontal posture—ironically less realistic than the more vertical and stable Japanese original, considering the ridiculous mass we’re talking. 

"And in just two weeks, you can have a body as slim as mine!"

This design was so poorly received by fans before release that the producers had to assure them, falsely, that it was in fact a hoax. Then, the film released, and while it certainly made money, it didn’t make enough for the studio, and many kaiju fans will declare it as pleasurable as having your face melted off by rancid radioactive reptile breath.

Is the film really that bad? I was there when it came out, and younger me certainly was wowed by the colossal marketing, cool-looking posters and the slew of merchandise. But, I was also getting into the Dark Horse comics about the real deal Toho version—and suffice it to say even then I may have been somewhat disappointed. However, let’s try and put the fanboy concerns to one side and judge it as its own movie.

For starters, the movie does have some actually fairly decent and atmospheric parts. The opening, set to stock footage of nuclear tests, is suitably chilling and foreboding, even if it spells out that the monster is literally an overgrown iguana. Some of the buildup to the reveal of the creature also reasonably paced, echoing the ’54 original where we only see glimpses and footprints at first. There’s also some instances of rather impressive model sets—like an egg-infested Madison Square Garden, or torn-up tankers that give a sense of escalating dread.

But then we have to face the characters, and that’s where it starts to fall apart. Independence Day had Will Smith at the peak of being the Fresh Prince of the entire world, Jeff Goldblum, and Bill Pullman—all of them great and iconic. This has…Matthew Broderick as dweeby scientist Pat Nick Tatapolous, kind of like the protagonist of Stargate. His main character trait is that everyone finds his surname unpronounceable, apparently. Co-starring is Maria Pitillo as his ex and Hank ‘Every Other Voice on the Simpsons’ Azaria. And come to think of it, there’s a slew of Simpsons voice actors here—it really gets distracting, when you have the guy that voiced Kent Brockman, literally playing Kent Brockman here with a name change, no joke. Sure, the Simpsons was real big at this time, but I doubt they needed the publicity. 

"Pardon my French, but Roland is so uptight, if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks, you'd have a diamond."

Filling in the supporting cast, we have a duo parodying Siskel and Ebert as the mayor and his assistant, trying to stick the finger to the critic pair for not being very nice to Stargate and the rest. But seeing as they don’t get eaten or mauled as you would expect, it’s just yet another bizarre distraction that doesn’t really add anything. Now, the one good spot is Jean Reno as a French secret agent trying to cover things up (not doing a very good job considering the renovation done to Manhattan, but oh well), and being a beacon of cool among all this. You’d think Leon fighting mutant lizards would be a match made in heaven…and it almost sort of gets there.

Once Big Iguana reaches New York and begins making a mess, there’s flashes of enjoyable moments, but it’s all held down by the murky visuals—there’s constant rain to hide up the CGI on the monster, but 20 years later it looks just dated next to ID4 even. And there’s the small fact that Biggy the Lizard doesn’t really cause most of the destruction—it’s all due to the US military forces apparently outsourcing their missile targeting to Microsoft, and missing all the time. You’d think it could be some commentary on the military-industrial complex, but it isn’t, and just feels plain dumb instead of enjoyably dumb. And when they’re not firing at this 200-foot critter to no avail, they’re engaging in barely watchable murky helicopter gunship chases through canyon-like city streets that don’t actually resemble New York but do in fact resemble the Death Star Trench. Emmerich sure liked to call back to a lot of things bar the actual Godzilla.

No clever girls here, sorry.

Amidst all this, Ferris Bueller hatches such genius scientific plans to lure or thwart Skinny the Giant Raptor, like piling up big piles of fish in the streets, piling up even bigger piles of fish, and eventually, teaming up with the French to storm the creature’s nest. There’s some romantic tension in between but frankly, who cares—Matthew Broderick isn’t going to suck you in with his love life anytime soon let’s face it. Now, because Jurassic Park was still riding strong, we get gun battles with hordes of miniature baby Zillas—made also distracting because they keep changing between actually really cool looking animatronics and CGI that looks like athlete’s foot.

Eventually, Lizzy the Ugly Lizard is killed by missiles and the movie inexplicably tries to make this some sort of tragic sight. It might be incongruous at first, but given that she’s mostly been surprisingly considerate about stomping around the city while being harassed by incompetent US forces that can’t aim, maybe she really was the innocent in all this. There’s a sequel hook that we’ll get to, but before that, the film ends with characters you don’t care about kissing in effects-obscuring rain.

The film isn’t irredeemably terrible—another good plus is the David Arnold score, which does have some foreboding leitmotifs. But overall, looking back, it’s pretty mediocre—it doesn’t have the gorgeous spectacle of Independence Day, nor even some of the characters on Stargate who went on to be iconic on the TV show. I’ll give it some decently shot scenes here and there, but if you want an enjoyably cheesy blockbuster from this time done by a European director, stick to Fifth Element.

In lieu of a followup film, we had an animated series that ran into the early 2000s. I remember it fondly, and looking back, it’s a decent romp for monster fans—there were lots of wild and fairly creative kaiju on offer, and much more tangible callbacks to the Toho films. I wouldn’t really urge you to rush out and watch it, but for a movie tie-in show from then, it was one of those that arguably surpassed the source material.

Afterwards, Emmerich went on to film the Patriot…well, I say film, but it felt like becoming Mad Mel Gibson’s willing puppet in a revisionist and boring historical extravaganza that boiled the American Revolution down to the latter’s self-insert knocking over eeeeevil British loyalists who were simultaneously unstoppable in threat yet unbelievably incompetent. Most of his films through the 2000s were pretty much dross; The Day After Tomorrow aimed to break your suspension of disbelief with killer weather, and 2012, while having some decent disaster porn, didn’t go above and beyond with the screenwriting either. He tried to return to his 90s peak with an Independence Day sequel that had some passable pew-pew action, lacked the visual impact of the original, despite the alien mothership being a million times bigger. And, more importantly, lacked Will Smith.

 America tried rebooting Godzilla again in 2014, with Gareth Edward’s title of the same name. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a much more sincere effort—it actually tried to convey the same apocalyptic monster magnitude like the 1954 film did, and sold the sheer scale far better than Emmerich. With the exception of the sadly under-used Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe, the characters were bland and forgettable…but they weren’t actively annoying, like most of the ’98 version. And, above all, it had Godzilla actually destroying things, as well as other badass kaiju destroying things, instead of most of the property damage being done by clueless jarheads. I can see people having some nostalgic sentiment for the Emmerich version, but I sure ain’t having anyone claim it was better than the 2014 film.

You’ll note I didn’t really refer to the creature in this film as Godzilla—and that’s because Toho themselves christened its true name as ‘Zilla’, taking the ‘God’ out of things. I can certainly see why. But, nevertheless, it’s all behind us now, and it looks like the issues that were with the 2014 film are being rectified with its upcoming sequel, bringing back classic monster characters like Mothra and King Ghidorah. If you don’t know who those are, well, let’s just say it’s like the Avengers of classic kaiju—and going by the trailer, we’re at least going to see them destroy everything. I’m friggin’ stoked to say the least.

That just goes to show that from mediocrity, something actually cool can eventually arise. The 1998 film got mixed reception from both viewers and critics, but many hold the subsequent cartoon in much fonder memory. It’s true that you don’t really expect fine cinema from a film about an overgrown atomic lizard with a really bad migraine, but even then, there are standards which unfortunately it didn’t really meet for me. Nevertheless, Godzilla is out to conquer Hollywood once more, and as long as he crushes Adam Sandler and many others, I’ll be cheering him on.