director
Roland Emmerich
screenwriters
Dean Devlin
Roland Emmerich
story
by
Ted Elliott
Terry Rossio
Dean Devlin
Roland Emmerich
producer
Dean Devlin
cinematographer
Ueli Steiger
music
David Arnold
editors
Peter Amundson
David Siegel
cast
Matthew Broderick (Dr. Niko Tatopoulos)
Jean Reno (Philippe Roaché)
Maria Pitillo (Audrey Timmonds)
Hank Azaria (Victor 'Animal' Palotti)
Kevin Dunn (Colonel Hicks)
Michael Lerner (Mayor Ebert)
Harry Shearer (Charles Caiman)
Arabella Field (Lucy Palotti)
Vicki Lewis (Dr. Elsie Chapman)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 138m
u.s.
release: May 19, 1998
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other roland
emmerich films
reviewed on this website:
- the
day after tomorrow
- independence
day
- the
patriot
- stargate
|
How
much does size matter? It matters a great deal to Hollywood
studios, and the very lucrative team of Roland Emmerich and Dean
Devlin -- Emmerich directs, Devlin produces, and they work together
on the scripts -- are a studio exec's dream come true. With StarGate
and Independence
Day, this dynamic duo proved they could create enormous
anticipation -- a bulletproof gotta-see-it campaign. What they
can't do, it's clear by now, is make a good movie to go with
the brilliant marketing.
Godzilla, the new big one from Emmerich and Devlin, achieves
the same weird paradox that ID4 did. It thunders into
view with the full weight of event marketing, yet the movie itself
is completely weightless. And, like Deep
Impact (to cite just the most recent example), it zaps
you with the spectacle of giant destruction and bores you with
puny human-interest stuff. Who cares whether biologist
Matthew Broderick and aspiring reporter Maria Pitillo get back
together? There's a monster knocking very large holes out of
New York City.
Emmerich and Devlin's genius at arousing anticipation does result
in a compelling first reel or so, here as in ID4. The
audience gets excited by the promise that something big is
coming. But when the something-big arrives, notice how fast
the awe wears off, how quickly the audience's giddiness turns
to restlessness. Godzilla goes on for two hours and eighteen
minutes, a great lumbering beast that has no personality, has
size but no power. Am I referring to the movie or the monster?
Both. The movie is bad in the same way that ID4 was bad:
It aims low and misses.
The big action scenes owe just about everything to both Jurassic
Park and The
Lost World: Godzilla running amok in New York is a pumped-up
version of the T. rex menacing San Diego, and there's an extended
sequence involving an army of baby Godzillas that blatantly rips
off the raptor scenes. I have no idea why Emmerich and Devlin
needed to up the ante by infesting Madison Square Garden with
mini-'zillas (why didn't they leave that for the sequel?); it
adds an unnecessary half hour. Godzilla himself is fun when he
first hits New York, but the filmmakers don't find anything imaginative
to do with him, and they keep him offscreen most of the time,
while we're stuck with Broderick whining and Jean Reno as some
special agent and lame humor at the expense of Siskel and Ebert.
The original Toho Godzilla (or Gojira), for all its guy-in-a-rubber-suit
cheesiness, had a lovely clunky charm. The new Godzilla, technically
whiz-bang though it is, actually looks bad next to the stop-motion
behemoths of Ray Harryhausen (whose It Came from Beneath the
Sea appears on a TV in the film) and the rubber suits of
Toho. In his obscure book The Total Film-Maker, Jerry
Lewis often refers to "the intangibles" of film. Well,
a monster that has been sculpted and manipulated by hand has
a tangible essence, a quality of having been worked on, that
a CGI-created beast, however skillful, simply doesn't have. This
Godzilla is an "intangible" in the wrong way.
After a while, Godzilla just strikes you as a big CGI blur; even
the streets and buildings he destroys look cold and computerized.
The deafening soundtrack tries to sell you size and force, but
if you watched Godzilla with the sound off, you'd see
a parade of thin, frantic images. This Godzilla even forgets
to include the traditional cautionary message about nuclear testing;
it's used as an explanation for the monster, but then the movie
drops it and concerns itself with ... how to prevent Godzilla
from nesting. In other words, "We don't care that we created
this thing; we just don't want it to reproduce."
The original Gojira was Japan's metaphor for the terrible mutating
power of Hiroshima. The new, Americanized version goes after
the great monster with the same military technology that dropped
the bomb. And in this telling, Hiroshima isn't even the cause
-- the culprit, it turns out, is France's nuclear testing. Blame
it on the French! The ironies and idiocies swirl together in
a bland soup that, for some viewers, may taste like entertainment.
Others may find it tasteless in both senses of the word. |