GODZILLA (1998) Can’t Even Be Saved By Childhood Nostalgia
A review of the overstuffed Roland Emmerich film.
“What’s with the chewing gum?”
“It makes us look more American.”
Godzilla (1998) — also disparagingly referred to in some circles as G.I.N.O (Godzilla In Name Only) — used to be the coolest thing when I was a kid.
I was 5 years old when it first came out, its cheeky and exorbitantly expensive “Size Does Matter” marketing campaign an inescapable fixture of the then-current pop culture. The tie-in singles by Jamiroquai (‘Deeper Underground’) and Sean “Puff P. Diddy Daddy” Combs (‘Come With Me’, featuring Jimmy Page in no small part thanks to the heavy interpolation of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’), along with both songs’ accompanying music videos, were all over my TV and radio at the time. I remember the Fox Kids animated spin-off show, Godzilla: The Series, being pretty great, in a similar vein to the other animated spin-off series that sprung up from other films in and around that period. (Remember Jumanji: The Animated Series, and The Mummy: The Animated Series, and Evolution: The Animated Series, and Ozzy & Drix, and so many, many others? Ahhhh… good times.) And for one of my birthdays or Christmases sometime around the film’s release, either before or after it came out on VHS, one of my parents even got me the official film tie-in action figure of Godzilla himself, which included a button that, when pushed, made the toy loudly emit the iconic Godzilla roar sound effect! Needless to say, I had a lot of fun staging epic battle scenes with my other toys facing off against his reptilian holiness, and my family were probably extremely annoyed by the noise of me pushing the Godzilla roar button a childishly inconsiderate number of times without me getting sick of it. (I don’t know what ever happened to that toy, or when exactly it got lost, but I kind of wish I still had it, if only for the nostalgic novelty.)
If only this Godzilla was still as enjoyable to me as it was to my childhood self.
To be fair, for the first 30 minutes or so of its exceedingly bloated runtime, I was able to give credit where it’s due to some of its stronger facets.
There’s the ominous opening credits sequence, which is where I first ever saw real footage of nuclear weapon explosions, and was terrified by the scale of those imposing mushroom clouds, and the destructive power they wielded. (When I eventually saw Dr. Strangelove several years later, I was bemusedly surprised to see its apocalyptic ending use some of the same stock footage of nuclear testing that Godzilla (1998) had also used in its opening minutes.)
The buildup to the full reveal of Godzilla isn’t badly handled, with us only seeing his giant teeth, his claws, his tail, his feet, and his humongous footprints carving a trail of destruction on land and sea. Taking his cue from Spielberg and Jaws, Roland Emmerich builds the suspense by withholding clearly seeing the kaiju star of the show, with the homage especially clear in the sequence where Godzilla pulls three trawlers down into the depths of the sea all in one go, his size and strength and underwater stalking presence signalled by the puny human constructions snagging on his body and getting dragged through the water.
The big budget blockbuster splashing of the cash is always plainly on screen, with tons of actors and extras, practical animatronic and miniature and pyrotechnic effects mixed together with the spotty CGI, a towering sense of scale, and vibrant cinematography captured beautifully on 35mm film (back when Emmerich, and Hollywood in general, still shot on film, and their movies at least looked good, which got taken for granted and largely discarded once digital shooting became the new normal).
David Arnold’s music is good stuff, appropriately menacing and epic, if a little bit too whimsical at times for my liking.
It lulled me into the false sense of security in thinking that maybe, just maybe, Godzilla (1998) deserved some modicum of reevaluation, especially in comparison to how too many big budget movies are made nowadays.
But then the film goes to New York, and the wheels start to come loose, as it introduces the convoluted ensemble of interconnected characters that comes from Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin flagrantly replicating their Independence Day storytelling formula virtually beat for beat (something that Emmerich has rigidly adhered to ever since, even as recently as his megaflop, Moonfall).
And as the film trudges on through its increasingly exhausting and uninteresting progression of plot, the annoyances start piling up to dismantle the good will the first act falsely instilled.
I don’t know if it’s the way she was written and/or directed to act, or if she was as equally miscast in her role as Matthew Broderick was in his, but good goddamn lord, Mario Patillo’s character of Audrey is just the worrrrrrst. A petulant, whining brat of a woman who behaves like a selfish teenager, and an unconvincingly naive wide-eyed waif, and a competent professional whenever the fluctuating whims of the script deem it so, all the while we’re somehow meant to care about her and Broderick’s fractious relationship, like we were with Jeff Goldblum and Margaret Colin’s characters in Independence Day, which this was clearly modelled on. But then you throw into the mix the shockingly bad, amateurish performance from Matthew Broderick as Nick Tatopolous (whose mispronunciation-based running gag will make sure you’ll never ever say prolific production designer Patrick Tatopolous’s name wrong ever again), coupled with the resulting non-existent, nigh on anti-chemistry between Broderick and Patillo, and all of it compounded by their turgid, unengaging relationship drama subplot dragging the whole movie down with it, and altogether you’re left enthusiastically rooting for Godzilla to hurry up and stomp or chomp these annoying humans out of the picture.
The second half of the film is the worst thing a movie can be, which is boring. A boring bore, and a chore to sit through. It gets quite repetitive and wheel-spinny with its plots to lure Godzilla out into the open and unleash the military’s might to inevitably fail to kill the king of the monsters, the action sequences failing to get the pulse racing as it blurs into a smear of sound and fury signifying nothing. Then there’s the outright coattail-riding copycatting of Spielberg (again!) and Jurassic Park, with the third act’s Madison Square Garden set-pieces substituting raptors for mini-Godzillas, to hugely diminished returns. It’s a slog, a drag, a slab of unbridled excess from a director who wasn’t even a fan of the iconic title character in the first place, producing a Godzilla movie that isn’t about much of anything substantial at all, besides Emmerich’s favourite hobby of staging spectacle out of rampant citywide destruction.
This lack of investment in Godzilla’s creation, history, and his fixture as an emblematic metaphorical manifestation of man-made disasters wrought by war and the weaponisation of science, can be felt by this American take on the character choosing not to engage in much of any political subtext, and minimising any hints of the contrary. Perhaps their reasons were more banally logistical than deliberately ideological, but either way, I do find it rather interesting that, as opposed to the Japanese original Godzilla’s conception being explicitly linked to, and borne from, the legacy of America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 90’s American remake of Godzilla shirks and sidesteps any mention or notion of America’s culpability in the creation and deployment of nuclear weapons that, in another cinematic universe, directly lead to Godzilla’s emergence from the dark ocean floor. Instead, this version makes Godzilla a nuclear mutation of a lizard from a French Polynesian island, inadvertently created by nuclear testing done by the French; hence the presence of Jean Reno’s enigmatic French Secret Service agent, there to “clean up” France’s mess and hide as much evidence of their involvement in Godzilla’s creation as possible, in yet another cog in the overly busy machine of the plot juggling a hundred characters and subplots at once.
Yeah, I know it’s silly to imagine a studio-backed American blockbuster production — in the 90’s, no less — would ever, in any conceivable universe, willingly make a $150 million dollar action adventure B-movie that doubled as some politically charged, subtly nuanced critique of the American military industrial complex, and America’s past wartime atrocities, that would thereby make the real villain in this monster movie be America itself. That would mean making the US domestic audience feel bad about themselves, and that would definitely damage the box office potential and lucrative merchandising opportunities! And besides, Emmerich and Devlin’s creative partnership was continually pumping out some of the most cornily earnest pieces of patriotically pro-America propaganda of the decade, and making a decent chunk of change in the process, so why mess things up by making Godzilla about something more than “big monster in New York make buildings go boom”?
But why pick the French, though?
Again, maybe the reasons were logistical rather than political. TriStar Pictures had brokered an agreement with Godzilla’s rights-holders at Toho, and so — if I think in cynical movie studio cravenness — maybe the American company figured it would be bad business to have their movie turn Japan into the bad guys, and America the unsuspecting good guys grappling with the situation instigated by Japan, in a complete reversal of how it was in the original film. That would be in poor taste, and would risk jeopardising the mutually beneficial financial prospects an amicable collaboration between TriStar and Toho could generate in both countries. So maybe they had the writers reverse engineer the plot around a different country’s history of nuclear testing, and that way, neither America or Japan would be at fault in the story, and thus their real-world film company relations could remain intact.
But why the French?!
I dunno, maybe Roland Emmerich was a fan of Léon: The Professional, and just really wanted to work with Jean Reno, so they retrofitted the conspiratorial state spy shenanigans around Reno’s nationality, and that’s how that happened.
Or, I may be wrong on all counts!
The truth is out there… I just don’t know it!
Anyway, there’s every chance that I’d rate this film higher if it was its own kaiju flick, unaffiliated with any other famous brands, yet clearly taking inspiration from the genre’s granddaddy that started it all. Y’know, like Cloverfield would go on to do 10 years later, albeit on a much smaller budget, and via the aesthetic of found footage.
But this chose to brand itself as Godzilla, and consequently, its disinterest in being a Godzilla movie unsurprisingly makes it a bad Godzilla movie.
(And holy mackerel, I didn’t even mention the inclusion of Michael Lerner’s Mayor Ebert, and his long-suffering aide Gene, the hardly-veiled-at-all fictionalised stand-ins for Emmerich and Devlin to take the piss out of their downward thumbs-sporting arch nemeses, Siskel and Ebert. Now that is a level of petty I can only aspire to! But then again, Emmerich didn’t even go full throttle with his wish fulfilment fantasy by finagling a scene where his avatars for Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert got munched by old ‘Zilla himself, which you’d think would be the entire point of their unofficial inclusion. Something said as much by Roger and Gene themselves when they reviewed the film, naturally with a resounding two thumbs down. Frankly, I think they would have been honoured to be eaten by Godzilla, but Emmerich failed to even give them that perverse pleasure… unless… that was a four-dimensional-chess-type move, and Emmerich intended to deny them the sight of themselves getting made a meal out of by Godzilla, because they’d get a kick out of it! Except… the man did make Moonfall, so I don’t think he’s operating on a galaxy brain level here…)
Originally published December 24th 2023 at https://jackandersonkeane.substack.com.
