Godzilla - The Plot is as Long as This Sentence
Zach Fine Daily Reporter
The burgeoning art of reptilian animation has made steady gains in realism since the charming 1914 silent animation short Gertie the Dinosaur. Certainly, the first photorealistic dinosaur animations were as fascinating to filmgoers watching Jurassic Park as were the early Edison studios' films of elephants walking and bathing to viewers at the turn of the century. Yet audiences eventually tired of watching pachyderms walking single-file, and so too might Godzilla mark a turning point in the history of film - the film which showed that big animated lizards could be boring.
The archetypal big lizard first appeared in the 1954 Japanese film Gojira, which was dubbed, re-edited, and in some scenes re-shot with American actors for its 1956 U.S. release. The film, which was made less than a decade after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, features a gigantic radioactive monster which rises from the Pacific, breathes atomic fire, and leaves entire Japanese cities in ruin.
Sure, Gojira may be a schlocky monster movie that features a guy in a rubber suit who stomps on model buildings, but it is surprisingly resonant. Scenes of doctors shaking their heads as they wave Geiger counters over screaming children whose lifeless parents are carted off on stretchers carry surprising emotional weight. The monster itself, while bipedal, was hardly anthropomorphic. Gojira was a force of nature, a gigantic, glistening, mindless monster which appeared for no apparent reason, spreading terror, destruction and radiation in its wake. Gojira was more than a 'B' movie.
The new Godzilla is much less. Writer-director Roland Emmerich and writer Dean Devlin, with the help of $160 million dollars and a top-of-the-line computer- animated marine iguana, have managed to create a brain-dead pile of hype.
In the film, the powers that be become alarmed at the growing evidence that points to the possible existence of a large and destructive radioactive dinosaur. They assemble a pool of scientists and in so doing interrupt the work of nerdy scientist Nick Tatopoulos (a helium-voiced and irritating Matthew Broderick), whose ha-ha funny name and chosen career of studying large radioactive earthworms in Chernobyl comprise fully 50% of the film's humor. Meanwhile, Audrey Timmonds (a helium-voiced, whiny, and pitiful Maria Pitillo), who aspires to be a broadcast news correspondent, instead finds herself relegated to the job of 'random office worker and sexual harassment recipient' at a television network. But when she realizes that she might be able to steal top-secret documents from Nick, her former lover, she figures she's got it made.
So much for background. The big iguana arrives at the 25-minute mark and starts tearing up the Big Apple. Nick chases Godzilla, Audrey chases Nick, and the military descends with an order of magnitude more helicopters than were used in Apocalypse Now. Godzilla turns out to be a difficult lizard to take down, what with those missile-proof scales, that atomic-fire breath, and knowledge of The Hunt for Red October. The incompetent and tyrannical Mayor Ebert (Michael Lerner) isn't all that happy watching his city become rubble, but the filmmakers enjoy making him look stupid as payback for his namesake's tepid review of Independence Day. Nick then discovers that Godzilla's laid a bunch of eggs, but nobody believes him except a French secret agent who can't find a decent cup of coffee (Jean Reno of La Femme Nikita) and his fearless crew (all named Jean), who provide the remaining 50% of the film's humor because, well, they're French.
Eventually, the eggs start hatching and the velociraptors - er, baby Godzillas - hatch and Nick starts theorizing that, ulp, this could be the end of humanity as we know it ...
Will humanity survive? Will Nick and Audrey get back together? Will she apologize to him for having had the gall to believe in herself enough to leave him for her career? Will she get the big story? Will room for a sequel be implied at the end?
Frankly, the only real surprise in the film is the realization of Godzilla herself. Sure, the filmmakers had plenty of bad decisions to make. They ignored the 20-plus sequels and took nothing from the original Gojira besides the transliterated name and basic premise, choosing instead to set an extended Jurassic Park; The Lost World in New York. They chose to make the film two hours and 20 minutes long. They chose to cast the tiresome Matthew Broderick in a major role and relegate the über-talented Hank Azaria to a supporting role. They made the female protagonist as feeble and flawed as possible. But to actually expect audiences to be scared by a large marine iguana?
It is a bit of a rabbit punch to go after this film for scientific inaccuracy, but it seems an odd choice to fashion the big scary monster after one of the only vegetarian reptiles. In reality, if a marine iguana were to swim all the way across the Pacific Ocean (from the Galapagos Islands to French Polynesia), then was exposed to radiation from nuclear testing which caused it to either grow really big or produce really big offspring, one might expect an iguana-derived Godzilla to eat tons of algae, sneeze salt all over the protagonists, and find a nice warm power plant to bask on.
Although the iguana in the film is lovingly rendered, dewlap and all, it is not terribly scary. Neither is the film Godzilla exciting, interesting, entertaining or even mildly amusing.
Copyright © 1998 Zach Fine
Article first appeared in the Thursday, May 28, 1998 Arts section of The Daily of the University of Washington.
http://www.thedaily.washington.edu/archives/1998_Spring/May.28.98/godzilla.5.27.html
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