GODZILLA
USA. 1998. Director - Roland Emmerich, Screenplay - Emmerich & Dean Devlin, Story - Devlin, Emmerich, Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, Based on the Character Created and Owned by Toho Inc, Producer - Devlin, Photography - Ueli Steiger, Music - David Arnold, Visual Effects Supervisor - Volker Engel, Godzilla Design & Supervisor - Patrick Tatopolous, Associate Visual Effects Supervisor - Karen Goulekas, Creature Supervisors - Kurt Carly & Bruce Marr, Creature & Digital Effects - Centropolis Effects, Digital Effects - Digiscope (Supervisor - Dion Hatch), Sony Pictures Imageworks (Supervisor - Jerome Chen) & Visionart (Supervisor - Joshua D. Rose), Miniature Effects - Cinnabar (Supervisor - Andrea Whittier), Sight Line Productions (Supervisor - Don Baker) & Striber Visual Network Inc (Supervisor - John Striber), Mechanical Effects Supervisor - Clay Pinney, Production Design - Oliver Scholl, Supervising Art Director - Wm. Ladd Skinner. Production Company - Centropolis Entertainment/Fried Films/Independant Pictures. Matthew Broderick (Dr Niko Tatopolous), Maria Pitillo (Audrey Timmonds), Jean Reno (Philippe Roache), Hank Azaria (Victor `Animal' Palotti), Kevin Dunn (Colonel Hicks), Michael Lerner (Mayor Ebert), Arabella Field (Lucy Palotti), Harry Shearer (Charles Caiman), Vicki Lewis (Dr Elsie Chapman), Doug Savant (Sergeant O'Neal)
Plot: Dr Niko Tatopolous, a biologist with the US Atomic Energy Commission specializing in radiation-mutated lifeforms, is flown to the South Pacific to investigate reports of a giant lizard, mutated as a result of French nuclear testing, which is attacking shipping. But the creature, nicknamed `Gojira' by a Japanese survivor and mispronounced as `Godzilla' by the American media, heads to Manhattan Island where it rampages through the city streets, causing mass destruction. As the military rally all efforts to stop it, Niko tries to alert them to the fact that it has laid a nest of eggs somewhere in the city.
Sometimes one just ends up scratching their head and wondering what it is that drives public tastes and/or the opinion of critics. Two years before when `Independence Day' became less of a film than it did an event, this critic ended up scratching his head and wondering what made everybody go so crazy about something so one-dimensionally cliched and simplistically flag-waving. Now I find myself in almost the opposite position. Despite a mega-hype build-up that announced it was from the same people as and would be even bigger than `Independence Day', `Godzilla' has opened in the US and confounded all expectation to become a middling flop with the public and with critics everywhere rushing to junk it. In fact it is not a bad film at all. If the truth be told it is really quite the most enjoyable, unpretentious out-and-out monster movie that has come this in some time. Why all the negative hoopla is frankly beyond one - perhaps it is the absensce of flag-waving that disappointed people.
One didn't really expect much from the film at all. Director Roland Emmerich and his co-writer Dean Devlin do not make particularly good sf. Devlin writes by cliche and Emmerich directs in simplistic emotional cues and their combined body of work - `Universal Soldier' (1992), `Stargate' (1994), `Independence Day' (1996) and the tv series `The Visitor' (1997) - lacks anything appreciable in the way of original ideas or challenging treatments of any of the themes. `Independence Day' is the best example of all their faults - mindless mega-scale special effects for their own sake and the substitution for election campaign-type populist sentiments in the place of drama. `Stargate' is their best film up to this point, which at least counterbalances their cliched writing with what is Emmerich's forte - the ability to conjure an effectively dramatic sense of wonder across an epic widescreen scale.
`Godzilla' is of course an updating of the long-running Japanese monster series - begun with `Gojira' in 1954, and passing through some twenty-one sequels until the character was officially killed off in 1995. Emmerich and Devlin do some occasionally clever updatings - in an amusingly contemporary move the creature has been mutated to giant-size by French nuclear testing in the Pacific. But mostly their writing is really terrible. Their characters are conceived as no more than caricatures - the French are snobbish about American junk food; the pompous mayor (who in an amusing move is named after one of the top US film critics) is a caricature that has been stolen straight from `Jaws'. And the romance between Matthew Broderick and vacuous bubble-gum blonde Maria Pitillo is appallingly written. The good thing about the film is that it rarely ever slows down enough to allow these one-dimensional figures time on screen.
The film is at its best when it is, without any pretensions, doing exactly what it has been designed to do - being a BIG scale, big-budget, no frills, thrill-a-minute rollercoaster ride of a monster movie. Something at which it succeeds more than admirably. Whenever Godzilla turns up on screen Emmerich unleashes some top drawer special effects - enthralling scenes of mass destruction with it smashing its way through downtown Manhattan and ripping swathes through entire skyscrapers with its tail alone; an oddly `Star Wars' Death Star trench-styled battle between it and army helicopters amid canyons of high-rise towers; an immensely exciting climax with it rampaging across and being trapped in a suspension bridge. Emmerich only unveils the creature gradually and keeps the camera down at ground level so as to heighten the sense of scale even more so. About three-quarters of the way through the film seems to abruptly kill Godzilla off and then gives the appearance of jumping tracks into another sort of film altogether with the principal characters fighting off a lethal bunch of baby Godzillas. The sequence is undeniably modelled after the raptor sequences in `Jurassic Park' but Emmerich whips it up into something intensely exciting. And as films go - compare it to the hollow soap opera of the same year's `Deep Impact' or the letdown that `The Lost World: Jurassic Park' was - you would be hard pressed to find any better adrenalin-charged, all-out effects excitement on the screen in the next while than `Godzilla'.
Reviewed by Richard Scheib
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