Godzilla (1998) * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A decent screenplay does matter.
The most depressing thing about GODZILLA, the over-touted Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich remake of the rubber-monster classic, is how little it exploits its own resources. It's itching with possibilities that never get used. The problem is, I have to review what's on the screen -- a noisy, witless, tame, lame, underwritten story that bulks overlong and features disturbingly inconsistent visuals. It's moderately entertaining, but God help you if you start realizing how thin it is while it's still on screen.
The movie's opening credits are inventive, giving us lizard eggs that are witnesses to various nuclear tests. But it doesn't develop that kind of cleverness elsewhere: we get not one but two teams of trawlers dragged down into the ocean, in sequences that are at first uninvolving and then ultimately repetitive. Then there is the creature itself, which veers between very convincing, sort of convincing, and ridiculously unconvincing -- not just in terms of what it can or can't do, but in how it's presented. The effects people also play dirty pool with parallax and perspective a lot: when the thing needs to be closer, it's closer; when it needs to be a long way off, poof! it's on the other side of town. Idiotic. (When it dives into the Hudson, for instance, it makes a splash about the size of someone throwing a van into the water.)
We don't have a lot to play with in the character department, either. Nick Tatapulous (played by Matthew Broderick, who looks about as Greek as I do Chinese) is a researcher into animal mutations caused by radioactive wastes, and when we first see him he's jamming electrodes into contaminated Chernobyl soil to get worms to come to the surface. Cute. He gets tapped on the shoulder to help determine what's been causing all of these ships to vanish, and puts the pieces together so quickly I can only assume he snuck a peek at the script. Couldn't he have let the rest of the cast in on it, too?
Broderick is joined by a bevy of other actors -- most of them not given anything substantial to do. Jean Reno is the best of the bunch, playing an insurance investigator who has his own agenda. He is smart and canny and resourceful, and we like him instinctively. His funniest, best moment has him giving sticks of gum to a gaggle of fake Army troops to make them look more "American", and we buy it. He deserves his own movie.
There's also Hank Azaria's cameraman character, Animal, who starts off promisingly but winds up getting used merely for mugging and reaction shots; more wasted potential. But the biggest waste is Michael Learner as Mayor Ebert, in a role that serves no purpose except to slow the story down and give a vehicle for the filmmakers to take cheap shots at two film critics they don't like. The first time was funny; by the seventh or eighth, I was too exhausted to wince.
I mentioned the worms and the chewing gum. Funny how the movie can cough up neat little asides like that to flesh out what is basically a lame story -- in other words, at no time did anyone try to apply the same kind of manic spirit to the movie AS A WHOLE.
Why didn't we have the mayor, for instance, turn out to be a former head of the transportation department who knows the subways intimately, which would give him a reason to exist (and would give them something else to film other than all those soldiers crawling around down there and acting like idiots)? Why didn't they take Animal and the stupidly conceived female journalist character and fuse them into a more interesting composite (since there's nothing they do that couldn't be handled more economically and interestingly by one full-fledged person)? Why didn't they make Godzilla's death(s) more creative -- by having him, say, knock a building over onto himself and break his own neck? I could go on, but you get the idea. And this was nothing but stuff people were tossing out on the way home in the car.
For a two-hour-twenty-minute running time, they stretch and huff and puff and find an incredible number of ways to justify the length. And in the end, I asked myself if I'd had fun, and all I could think about was how the massively expensive soundtrack had given me a toothache out of sheer volume.
FOOTNOTE: Over the closing credits, we get an industrial-rap remix of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir". Fitting irony, since Page and Plant's publishing company was called, after all, Superhype.
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