Movie: Godzilla [Theaters - 5/98] Reviewed on 6/06/98
I love movies big, movies small, movies bad and movies excellent. It's the ones in between I can't stand.
Godzilla is a little bit of all of this.
Let's put it like this. When this movie came out, critics panned it for being plotless. Pointless. Lack of decent dialog. Yada. Yada. Did these guys watch any of the original movies? I adored them. In case you missed the basis, here's the plot of every Godzilla movie ever made:
1.Monster or Monsters awake or arrive from ridiculous concept. Concepts can include frozen slumber, lab mutation or time travel. 2.Monsters spend considerable time and plot to reach a metropolis. This is because monsters love an audience. This metropolis is almost invariably Tokyo, but exceptions do occur. 3.Extras, a few unknown actors and the occasional Raymond Burr throws considerable military power and scientific knowledge at the monsters to generally no avail. 4.Switch between blue screened special effects, miniatures, screaming extras and large amounts of latex. 5.Monsters generally get tired of the action. They are, after all, quite large. They generally sludge back into the ocean and roll some credits.
Point is that if there was ever a movie whose premise allowed it to be an idiotic slugfest of special effect wizardry and large buildings being cut down to size, Godzilla was it. In fact, if there was a problem I had with the movie, is that they didn't have enough of it. They introduce baby godzillas (ick...didn't even work in the old ones) which makes it a little too slick and suspenseful. Anyone can take a bunch of film from a poorly lit corporate building and paste some 3D alien/lizard/squid thingy after some aptly screaming actors. The beauty of Godzilla is scale. Watching buildings fall. Tanks get squashed. And mankind learn it suddenly became the runt of the block.
Overall: A fun romp in central park with huge, fantastic special effects. Wonderful lack of plot and great silly dialog. Unfortunate injection of standard fair Alien-esque subplot and not nearly enough squashing, screaming and general mayhem. -- Joshua Birk ______________________________ home email:inkless@inkless.com The Cutting Room Floor - Reader Based Reviews http://www.inkless.com/crfloor/
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