Back from the 90s: Godzilla (Dir Roland Emmerich, 2h 19m, 1998)

The year is 2004. The film is Final Wars, a big-screen send-off to the Japanese cultural icon, Godzilla, already the star of over thirty movies plus movies over 50 years. We join our hero as strolls into Sydney Harbour to face his newest foe, with a number of his classic rogues gallery already summoned by our alien antagonist, and bested by Godzilla. Facing him...is another Godzilla. Not a carbon copy of the Japanese monster (heck, Toho had been having him face off against creatures created from himself for most of the 90s), but the American version, from a film released six years back, a hunched, dinosaur looking CGI mess.

Against it stands the iconic rubber suit that has brought Godzilla to life for over half a century-to date this is the last film where Godzilla will be played entirely in suitmation. The usurper roars a challenge, charges, and in response, Godzilla fires his legendary atomic fire; the false Godzilla jumps, but our hero has already seen this coming, battering him into the Sydney Opera House with his tail. Godzilla once again uses his atomic breath, his adversary (and the Antipodean landmark) blow up, and the fight ends. It's lasted under 25 seconds-it still stands as the shortest fight in any of Godzilla's movies.

Six years after their American debacle, Godzilla and Toho have their revenge. But who was this young pretender? Who exactly was Godzilla and his home for over fifty years getting their own back on, in gloriously over-the-top kaiju style? Why was this revenge so public? The answer lies in 1998's Godzilla, an American re-imagining of the Japanese icon, in which Columbia Tri-Star and disaster artist, Roland Emmerich get almost every aspect, not only of adapting a beloved cultural icon, but in basic film-making wrong. It is the moment the blockbuster, the disaster movie, the monster movie meet their end.

Roland Emmerich is, surprisingly, a new face to this column; doubly surprising when you consider he has made exactly one-and-a-half good movies in a thirty plus year career in Hollywood. Hailing from Germany, and already having made a name for himself in horror-thrillers like Joey (1985) and Ghost Chase (1987), Emmerich comes into a bit of luck, alongside writer Dean Devlin, as the director's chair is vacated by Andrew Davis for 1990's Universal Soldier, which pitches Van-Damme against Lundgren in a slick, if largely silly action movie. Following this is Stargate, an enjoyably over-the-top mix of Ancient Egyptian conspiracy theories, sci-fi shoot-em-up, and rollicking action flick that spawned three long-running TV series, as well as dozens of comics and books.

It features two tropes that will become apparent in Emmerich's future work; his films' focus upon central mysteries in their plot-what, for example, is the Stargate of the film's title, and his love of spectacle, colossal destruction, and special effects. The stage is set, inevitably, for Independence Day, which picks up these two key tropes of Emmerich's work and magnifies them to be all-encompassing. Here, the central conceit is that aliens are invading, only Jeff Goldblum's raddled TV repair man is able to realise that they're sending a secret coded countdown, and by the time he reaches people in power, Emmerich is in full swing, blowing up the White House in perhaps the single most famous effects shot of the 90s, and, of course, Manhattan, because why not?

Unfortunately, the second half of the film, once aliens have blown up most of America's landmarks, is a tiresome gung-ho fight back, in which Will Smith's fighter pilot and Bill Pullman's President take centre stage. Nevertheless, the film was a colossal financial success, becoming the highest grossing film of a busy 1996, won one Academy Award, and was nominated for another. In the background, though, Emmerich's next film was already taking shape, and a six year process to bring Godzilla westward was about to bear an altogether unwelcome crop, far from the exuberance there had been when Toho and Tri-Star first made their agreement in 1992

America has long had a strange relationship with Godzilla; from 1956's Godzilla, King of the Monsters (an extensively re-edited cut of the 1954 original, starring Raymond Burr as our reporter hero), through to an unproduced 1983 film Godzilla King of the Monsters In 3-D, Burr's reappearance in Godzilla 1985 (1985), so Godzilla was no stranger to American multiplexes, whilst his adventures, via lapsed copyright, bundled rights deals, and outright piracy, were increasingly common on VHS and cable. One such licensor, Henry G. Saperstein, (also responsible for bringing the Japanese comedy-spy film, Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (1965) to the west, later to be adapted by Woody Allen into What's Up Tiger Lily (1966)), finally got the rights for an American adaption, alongside Sony, albeit with certain caveats, including a lengthy document dictating the appearance of the creature.

Attached to script was Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, the duo who had already written Aladdin (1992), and who would later write Shrek (2001) and all five Pirates of the Caribbean films; their script, undeniably. was reverent to its subject matter, capturing the character arc of the early Toho films, set against a Moby Dick style revenge plot, and with director Jan de Bont, already with Speed (1994) under his belt, all things pointed towards Godzilla going into production for a 1996 release. Unfortunately, at this point, one of cinema's great might-have-beens ran into reality, with their projected budget of $200 million slashed to $80 million, and Bont would eventually walk together with Elliot and Russo, leaving the script to gather dust on the internet till 2018, when it resurfaced and was adapted into a comic book. This, of course, left the door open for Emmerich and Devlin.

Unfortunately, the door was open for Emmerich and Devlin; their Godzilla quickly threw caution to the wind and changed tack in terms of tone, the narrative arc, and indeed the design of the creature; this came to a point in an infamous meeting where Patrick Tatopoulos (later to lend his surname to Godzilla's protagonist), and Emmerich presented their design of Godzilla to Toho, to be met with complete, and nigh-unprecedented silence, the shock of how different the American Godzilla was resounding. Whilst Toho eventually gave their blessing, this was only after Toho went to Godzilla's creator, the legendary Tomoyuki Tanaka, for his blessing of the colossally divisive redesign. At least the script hewed closer to Godzilla's Japanese origins, making him the creation of nuclear radiation, but even here, Godzilla got tweaked, with the ability to tunnel and lay eggs inherited from his iguana-based origin. Tri-Star okayed the script, the film went into production, and a vast media and merchandising machine went into action to hype up the American King of the Monsters' arrival on the big screen

Godzilla'98 starts, undeniably, strongly; like its 2014 successor, the American Godzilla movie can never quite resist an opening montage, and here, accompanied by David Arnold's Sturm und Drang score, the origin of this Godzilla, in French Pacific nuclear tests, is presented in the film's opening credits, avec Trinity test footage, ominous counting et al. It's also here that you begin to realise exactly how bad this Godzilla movie is going to be, and how fundamentally Emmerich and co are going to misinterpret Godzilla and his origins. For, undeniably, Godzilla is a manifestation of America, and in particular, the nuclear bomb, in the minds of the Japanese. The original 1954 film, made barely a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is a searing, and at some points overwhelming reflection of the destruction of those two cities, whilst the thawing of the King of the Monsters in the late 1960s and early 70s into an openly heroic figure reflect thawing relationships between the two countries.

Certainly when Hideaki Anno came to adapt the creature for the post Tohoku/Fukushima period, America takes on a quasi-villainous role, answering the roars of the nightmarish, nuclear-pocked and scarred Godzilla, with violence of their own. Even in Gareth Edwards' 2014 adaption, he ties Godzilla to Trinity, even if, in-universe, this was an abortive attempt to rid the world of the titanic Kaiju. It doesn't work, but at least it doesn't stoop to trying to blame the French for the creation of a monster that is an overt manifestation of American militarism and power-though, to try and paint the USA as villains in the post Gulf War, pre War on Terror era, was, undeniably, tantamount to commercial suicide.

It may thus surprise you to hear that, up until Godzilla pops up out of the Hudson, I don't actually have much of a problem with the film; it's a great bit of escalating action and cinematic puzzle-building that works relatively well. It also helps that Emmerich has always been great at these sequences for building tension, and the attack on the cannery ship that immediately presents the threat of Godzilla, crashing through the boat, and leaving carnage in his wake, is enjoyably epic pandemonium. It also pushes our story quickly forward, the attack leaving only one survivor who is promptly picked up by shadowy Frenchmen, led by Phillipe Roaché (Jean Reno), undeniably the best character in the film, who manages to get the name "Gojira" out of the old man. Roaché will proceed to reappear as Godzilla slowly approaches New York, as an insurance agent, before once again disappearing into the shadows for the second third of the film.

Unfortunately, whilst Roaché is by far the most fun, and the closest to breaking that Emmerich/Devlin formula, it's now time for our actual hero, Matthew Broadrick's Nick Tatopoulos, to appear on the scene, worm hunt around Chernobyl for a bit, then get kidnapped by the US Army, where he is introduced to two more nerdish experts (Vicki Lewis and Malcolm Danare), and our tough but ultimately likeable military guy for the evening, Hicks (Kevin Dunn), who are on the trail of the same monster that destroyed the cannery ship, and is now leaving a trail of chaos across the Caribbean, including colossal footprints and another beached ship, all of which begins to point, as Nick dubs the creature they're tailing as an entirely new creature, as it promptly pulls a trio of fishing ships down in another well-shot and genuinely tense sequence, that places the still mysterious creature mere dozens of nautical miles from New York. We get one final moment of tension in which an old man finds he is reeling in a bigger fish than he could possibly have imagined and then...

...And then, rising over one of New York's many bridges, comes this film's version of Godzilla. It’s...honestly speaking, this is where the film instantly starts to deteriorate; the design is bad-even compared to the campiest, goofiest designs for Godzilla, there's a certain charm. This is not to say Godzillas design is a static concept-he's barely spent two movies with the same suit design, but Zilla, as we're going to dub him now, is too different, too animalistic, even for a series that's often set him as a bully and a brute, and the design is, frankly, too weak to stand up in a movie where he's the only kaiju, another of the film's key weaknesses. The 2014 Godzilla may be more a human drama flanked by monsters, but its chunky, pug-faced Godzilla is charming, and even his heel-ish turn in Godzilla V Kong keeps close to this design, albeit sharpened and more dangerous.

Zilla is big, dumb, and, given he's almost exclusively rendered in CGI, (with barely twenty shots in the film using physical miniatures or animatronics), seeing him in daylight is messy, has dated about as well as the peak 1998 soundtrack, and painfully unconvincing-it's not surprising that almost the entire marketing of the film kept them off the screen in full, reduced to colossal foot, eye, or simple measure of majestic scale ("His foot is as big as this bus", etc.). Unfortunately, rampaging around New York, causing unconvincing chaos, is promptly what Godzilla decides to do, and it is here that the film introduces the rest of its cast, in its unexpected The Simpsons reunion of Harry Shearer's odious journalist, Hank Azeria's quintessential "I'm Walking Here" New Yawker, Animal, and Nancy Cartwright's cameo as a secretary, together with Maria Pitillo's every-girl ex-girlfriend, Audrey, and her irritating sidekick, Lucy (Arabella Field).

There's also a bizarre double-team of Mayor Ebert and his aide Gene (a piss-poor "take that!" to the two film critics, never especially fans of Emmerich's work), who, given their basis, their squabbling relationship, and general stunned reactions to the big effects moments, remain bizarrely unsquashed. It is execrably bad writing. Frankly, each character wanders around with one major personality trait affixed to them, (well, two, but since everyone aside from Roache and Nick is extremely annoying, it rather cancels out), and are frankly the nadir of Emmerich and Devlin's ensemble cast writing. There's also Hicks' underling, O'Neill (Doug Savant), who is essentially in the film for Hicks to have someone to shout orders at; as a result, he's far more fun than most of the rest of the cast.

Godzilla, after stomping, but sadly not squishing Azeria, storms around Manhattan for a bit, then proceeds to disappear. This incarnation of Zilla, for what it's worse, is a hundred plus feet tall, and several hundred feet long. Worse, sans Zilla, the film involves itself with human plotlines, as most of our cast respond to the creature's appearance (and just as sudden disappearance), idling along till its star's next appearance. It's...painful. What's worse is that, even when Zilla reappears, this time tempted by a "lot of fish!" his destructive rampage is oddly low-key. It never feels believable. Unlike Independence Day's visceral chaos, it never feels like any of our heroes, let alone many of New York's landmarks are in danger. The subsequent fighter jets v kaiju chase is leaden, our cannon-fodder military types quickly outwitted and munched, and once again, Godzilla disappears back into the plothole from whence he emerged.

In fact, compared to Emmerich's love of carnage, miniatures blowing the fuck up, and iconic landmarks biting the dust, the film is surprisingly stingy with the chaos; only the Met Life building is destroyed in the initial chaos, as a veritable cameo, the Flatiron is damaged, and the "Goddamn" Chrysler Building is accidently partially destroyed by the military after Godzilla skips out on the fishy booby-trap and heads across Manhattan, and the finale blows up Madison Square Garden, and wrecks the Golden Gate Bridge. Barely five major buildings bite the dust, from a director whose films are basically defined by destruction and chaos, directing a film adapting a series where intricate models of Tokyo being crashed through by two or more burly guys in rubber suits is practically the golden rule...is a bizarre and head-scratching sensibility.

Having just (God)Zilla is bad enough, the unstoppable force barely held back by the military that seem to always act as hors d'oeuvre, as warm-up act in his native Japan, before the other Kaiju roar over the hills into open battle. To have him tiptoe around New York rather than crash through buildings every five minutes, or sprawl across Broadway as New York's new king, or to storm across Central Park is at once ridiculous and insulting, as though Emmerich's usual relish for destruction is kept in check by the fact that a sizeable chunk of his audience (and those bankrolling the film) live in the city he's keen to destroy. It's oddly muted, and the film then proceeds to speed-run through both a rekindling of romance, and subsequent betrayal of Nick by Audrey, Nick finding Zilla is pregnant, Audrey's boss, (Shearer) stealing her story, and presenting Godzilla rather than Gojira to the masses, Nick getting booted out of the team, and Nick being picked up by Roaché and his team, who reveal themselves to be French Secret Service bent on fixing their nation's mistakes by dealing with Zilla and their nest. This happens in under five minutes. We are barely halfway through the film.

The film thus essentially splits into three storylines at this point for a bit-Nick and Roaché finding the nest in Madison Square Garden, followed by their discovery of 200 eggs that promptly hatch and allows the film to take part in sub Jurassic Park-raptors shit for a bit, as Roaché's team is picked off. Next is Audrey and Animal following Nick, which basically rolls into Nick's storyline after the reveal of the nest, and, several Frenchmen down, allows Nick, Audrey, Animal and Roaché to do roundly dumb sub-Scooby-Doo chase stuff, before barricading themselves in the on-site TV station set to warn the world of Zilla's numerous and men-in-rubber-suited offspring, and the threat they pose (in sequel-baiting). Finally, dotted between these moments is a second, almost identical showdown between the military and Zilla, that at least leads to a decently shot, if utterly stake-less battle in the Hudson. Godzilla destroys a sub, plays dead, and the military claim victory.

Our heroes finally attract the attention of the media, (and the American military), and the quartet find themselves Scooby-Dooing against the clock. Their escape is, whilst phoned in, admittedly a little bit tense, trying to make their way to the outside world as the dual threat of a bomber that leisurely wings its way over Manhattan and the ever-growing squadron of hungry baby Zillas hem our heroes in. Of course, things happen at the nick of time, and, contrivances galore, the film leaves them just enough time to escape before a(n admittedly impressive) miniature shot of Madison Square Garden blows up, the day is seemingly won, and the film itself feels like it's going into full pre-credits wrap-up. And then Godzilla pops up out of the gutted remains of Madison Square Garden, and the film seems to remember it has another half hour left of its running time.

And then something really weird starts to happen. Godzilla starts to get vaguely enjoyable. It's still roundly terrible, but something about this oddly disjointed finale feels, paradoxically, far more of a thrill than the turgid whack-a-Zilla of the previous hour and a half; perhaps packing the entire cast into a NY taxi and having a vengeful 200 ft lizard who wants to Make Them Pay barrelling after them through downtown New York, fixated on their demise simply adds stakes to a film that's practically fangless. It certainly seems to pack as many setpieces into its chase as the rest of the movie, and at some points you can almost believe a more committed film maker, really trying to make some grand allusion to the 1954 original's Dr Serizawa, would have had one of the cast sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity. (sadly, the lot of nameless French Secret Service mooks). Hell, O'Neill, the mookiest mook who ever mooked, gets to be the pivotal figure of the sequence, setting up a connection between the taxi and the military.

Unfortunately, and in perhaps the film's greatest sacrilege, it's Zilla who bites the dust, mortally wounded by the military-the same military who seem to spend every Godzilla movie on the back foot and who have never actually downed a kaiju in the series' entire history-and the film turns curiously mawkish for the creature's last breaths, trying to pull in sympathy for a monster that was trying to eat our cast, before it finally expires, and the film goes back to its typical America New York Fuck Yeah ending. Nick and Audrey are reunited, Animal tailing along, Harry Shearer, and Not!Ebert and Not!Siskel are given the heave-ho, whilst Roaché wanders off into the distance, to be in much better movies. Meanwhile, back at Madison Square Garden, an egg pops open for the sequel that became a far better and more faithful cartoon series, and the movie collapses into Puff Daddy murdering Led Zeppelin.

Godzilla is a fundamentally broken movie. There is no level on which this American adaption is anything other than brand recognition; it fundamentally misunderstands the tone, the structure, the hero, and the very nature of Godzilla movies. It's wrong on almost every level imaginable, and the way it adapts this icon of Japanese pop-culture to a Western audience whilst filleting out anything of Godzilla's origins that may tweak the nose of the average popcorn guzzling Yank-this is a Godzilla utterly divorced from the very events that inspired his creation. What Emmerich and Devlin put in its place is sub-Friends soap-opera New Yawkerisms, a fat payday for half the The Simpsons' cast, a friendly pat on the head for the (largely incompetent) military-industrial complex, and millions of dollars of plastic toys on a one-way-trip to landfill.

I said last week that Batman & Robin didn’t kill the superhero movie. I can say, however, for definite, Godzilla killed not just the disaster movie, but the monster movie as well, for nearly a decade, if not more. It killed them stone dead, and we were left with wince-inducing garbage like The Core (2003), Poseidon (itself a remake, 2006) and so on, whilst it would take no less than Kong himself (2005), and the true American kaiju, Cloverfield (2008) to bring the genre back from the brink. Godzilla wouldn't step foot in American theatres till 2014, when Gareth Edwards' reverent adaption would finally bring us a Western Godzilla to be proud of, and his subsequent rampages (2018, 2021 and 2024!) have been enjoyable homages to the spirit of the series, at its biggest and most spectacular.

Perhaps the biggest casualty of Zilla though, is Emmerich himself. Whilst, unlike the other figures on this series so far, Emmerich is still a fairly major player in the blockbuster market (and, to be entirely fair his sterling advocacy work outside of film-making is commendable), there is the sense that Godzilla permanently damaged his career, both from its narrative, and financial failures. Most of his disaster movies have felt positively mechanical, even the mooted return-to-form 2012 (2009), which squanders an enjoyable premise for all too much techno-silliness, whilst the po-faced The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and the genuinely fucking ridiculous Moonfall (2022), sit side by side with tired historical revisionism (The Patriot (2000) Anonymous (2011) and Stonewall (2015)), and just genuinely bad film making.

Emmerich's big dumb devastation pictures feel like the perfect epitome of 90s escapism; they're a faded and bygone thing-cinematic destruction underwent an entirely necessary revision after 9/11, and in modern cinema, even the films of Michael Bay seem to angle chaos and massive destruction from a human scale. They simply don't make them how they used to, and for all their vicariousness, they, out of all the films of the 90s feel like those carefree years in the West encapsulated. I've never truly enjoyed Godzilla (1998); but it was an undeniable gateway into that legendary beast's filmography. I loved the cartoon, the weekly monster battles and the ever-more complex story of Godzilla's surviving egg fighting alongside humans to protect the world. It's a Godzilla series made with more deference to the original films than Emmerich ever had.

A few years after it, I'd buy Godzilla V Hedorah (1971), a psychedelically inclined entry, coming out towards the tail end of Godzilla's first era, Showa. I was hooked. I started writing stories about Godzilla. I even tried to make a Godzilla movie! It's the first time I've looked at a film and instantly wanted to make something like it. I give Roland Emmerich that-he opened the door to so many people to discover the Japanese original.

But otherwise, Godzilla is a crushing disappointment. It's fitting that Toho dubbed this pretender to the throne Zilla, as though, not only is he a mere mortal, but a mere dumb lizard compared to the original. We are left with a God(zilla)-less world of misery, bad jokes and whack-a-mole plotting. Godzilla is a failure on every single cinematic level. What should have been the triumphant arrival of one of cinema's great cultural icons fizzles out into a boring, dull roar of spectacle that feels as empty as the performances within it, and as painfully artificial as its CGI two hundred ft iguana. It is the film that killed disaster movies, consigned its director to ever diminishing returns, and left one of cinema's greatest creations floundering around New York in his worst ever outing.

Rating: Avoid

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