GODZILLA (1998) (Tri-Star) Starring: Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Maria Pitillo, Hank Azaria. Screenplay: Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich. Producer: Dean Devlin. Director: Roland Emmerich. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (intense situations, profanity, some violence) Running Time: 135 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin have thrown down the gauntlet to film critics...or, at the very least, to two film critics in particular. In GODZILLA, the latest summer spectacle-cum-marketing assault from the creators of INDEPENDENCE DAY, a mutant reptile from the South Pacific comes to New York City on a rampage, much to the consternation of the city's blustering mayor (Michael Lerner). A corpulent fellow with familiar graying hair and glasses, the mayor noshes on Hershey's kisses between campaign stops where he gives citizens his "Thumbs Up for New York" signal. Oh, and his name is Mayor Ebert. Oh, and he has an ineffectual, balding assistant named Gene.
I don't know why Emmerich and Devlin found this snarky fit of retaliatory pique necessary. Certainly the negative reviews of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert didn't hurt the box office take of "ID4," which somehow overcame two thumbs down to gross $300 million in North America. GODZILLA is certain to be similarly critic-proof, pitting a massive CGI beast against intrepid biologist Nick Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick), his former girlfriend and aspiring reporter Audrey Timmonds (Maria Pitillo) a mysterious Frenchman (Jean Reno), the entire U.S. Army and the fortunes of every other summer film standing in its path. Is critical acceptance so important to the film-makers that doing well isn't good enough as the best revenge?
If such is the case, here's a simple bit of advice for Emmerich and Devlin: make better movies. GODZILLA is a baby step in the right direction, if for no other reason than that it's more honest in its big-budget intentions than the dopey and grandiose INDEPENDENCE DAY. Using ALIENS and JURASSIC PARK as its models rather than the adventures of its rubber-suited predecessor, GODZILLA takes only half an hour before the scaly behemoth hits the Big Apple and turns midtown Manhattan into a Jurassic parking lot. This sequence is followed by a dizzying helicopter chase through the man-made canyons, which is followed by an underwater encounter with submarines, which is followed by a search for what may be the creature's nest, and so on. The sheer variety of situations insures a consistent level of interest, while simultaneously insuring several unique levels for the inevitable Sony PlayStation version of the game.
Whenever the film rests on human shoulders, however, you could sprain your eyeballs from rolling them. Continuing their uncanny knack for inane back-story, Emmerich and Devlin create a mayo-on-white-bread relationship dynamic between Broderick and Pitillo, and a mission for Reno which makes less and less sense every moment I think about it. The dialogue is hopelessly feeble, the attempts at humor strained even by action movie standards, and the characters so caricatured that Al Hirschfeld should have drawn them. Most unforgivably, GODZILLA wastes the immense comic talents of Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer, restricting Azaria to loyal sidekick duty as Pitillo's cameraman and leaving Shearer to do a half-hearted (and less animated) version of his "The Simpsons" anchorman Kent Brockman. Even the always-appealing Broderick looks baffled by how to be charming in such a suffocating role.
At least Emmerich sends the audience home on a high note, closing GODZILLA with a superb sequence in which Godzilla chases a cab through the city, eventually onto the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a sharp piece of action film-making, and not the only one. Yet GODZILLA can't get by on its big-ness alone; in fact, the visuals sometimes seem decidedly less than state-of-the-art, particularly when our heroes are threatened inside Madison Square Garden. When a blockbuster exists solely to impress you with "you gotta see this" tricks, it's tough not to be disappointed when you've seen the tricks before, and seen them done better. There are ways around that disappointment, though, which Emmerich and Devlin should ponder: Write better scripts. Create real characters. Make better movies. Either that, or continue blaming the messengers for the way they hold their thumbs.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 monster islands: 5.
Visit Scott Renshaw's MoviePage http://www.inconnect.com/~renshaw/ *** Subscribe to receive new reviews directly by email! See the MoviePage for details, or reply to this message with subject line "Subscribe".
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews