Two legged Lizards and Fire Breath (Godzilla 1998)

Before I start I have to say that I hate this film. Hate as in utterly despise this putrid insulting mess of a film. This isn’t something like Plan Nine where Ed Woods technical and budget limitations helped create the mess that is Plan Nine or the awful Robot Monster. No this had a huge budget, a director of no little self confidence and all modern special effects toys – it was going to be the first of three films – a new beginning. And this sack of garbage is what you got. A loud and pointless insult to the intelligence – a film that treats its viewers with utter contempt. And whose viewers treated it in kind to the point where Sony had to shut down the comment section of their Official Movie Website.

The badness starts early – there is a scene where Matthew Broderick (who has to regret this even more than doing inspector Gadget) a scientist (here’s a casting problem Matt’s a good easy going guy – scientist type – no) an expert on atomic mutation (what else) is standing in a hole (a metaphor for the entire damn film) and asking the guy who dragged him there “what am supposed to be looking for?” then the camera moves back and ta-da we see they are standing in a foot print – a big one – the only trouble is there was not way they could get to this foot print without seeing that it was a foot print. Dumb lazy filmmaking along the lines of “hell it’s just a monster movie” (unlike your deeply serious work Independence Day Ronald? Jesus. Hell I didn’t mind ID4 it was really just a 1950’s sci fi film with 1990’s special effects – not much else but it didn’t need to be. )

There is some tooing and frowing – with fast editing to make us think that something is going to happen – and the Godzilla arrives in New York. And right away Houston we have a problem.

I read some where that when I am god incarnate Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin took over this project they tossed the original script and monster concepts and had their own design made up – they based their Godzilla on an Iguana.

You know – when I think about scary animals I have to say Iguana is not the first one that pops into mind – or even the 30th – at best you could say that Iguana’s are unsettling in that they have that blank lizard – is this thing really alive – stare that we being mammals find disconcerting – but that’s about it. Iguanas like most lizards – don’t do much – sit on rock, eat, stuff like that. They are pretty mellow guys.

And why Iguanas? Well Godzilla is supposed to have resulted from French H-bomb tests on islands with Iguanas – fair enough no dumber that most monster movie ideas. (The French thing is an excuse to have Jean Reno (who fled America after this) in the movie – he does and okay job – the only actor who does but you can tell his heart is not in it).

I don’t know who designed the creature – but god in heaven they did a damn piss poor job of it. The defining characteristic of their Godzilla is a huge jay Leno style lower jaw. Huh? I mean come on – that isn’t scary – that looks goofy – little Abner has a big lower jaw – comic characters have a big lower jaw – not fucking monsters. But there is was – (and that screaming of horror you heard were the businesses who had spent millions on licensing rights realizing that they had just lost their money) in all his goofy glory.

Per the IMDb one of the people who gets killed early in the film is a double for the editor of G-Fan Magazine who leaked details of the creature’s appearance and said it sucked. Emmerich and Devlin are very thin skinned for Hollywood people. They also have the Mayor of New York and his aide (who are played as idiots) look like Gene Siskel and his late partner Rodger Ebert who did not like ID4. I mean guys doing something like this makes you look even stupider. The only people I knew that could do something like that and get away with it were Bob and Ray who’s Broadway show got only one bad review - from Roger Simon – Bob and Ray soon introduced a character named somewhat like Roger who did nothing but eat sandwiches with the wax paper still on them.

That was funny. This is not.

So the monster wanders about New York – doing well – nothing really – and this is another problem – the filmmakers once they had gotten Godzilla to New York didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what to do with him (here’s a hint – have him knock down buildings jackass like you know – in the other 27 films? This isn’t rocket science folks) so he vanishes. He vanishes and then is lured out with what looks like a Godzilla sized kitty bowl full of fish. Then he runs away after the army starts shooting – he runs away a lot – Kenpachiro Satsoma who wore the G suit from 1985-94 walked out of a screening of this movie because the creature did not have “Godzilla’s spirit.” And vanishes again. This time hiding in a subway tunnel if memory serves – which makes you wonder how stupid the people looking for him are – even assuming he could fit in a subway station – one of the lazy bits of this movie is that the creatures size varies from scene to scene – he’s bound to leave a pretty big fucking hole going in yes? Granted it’s raining – it rains most of the movie the better to hide how lazy and unspecial the CGI imagery and the effects are – but guys there’s a monster loose in New York, that should pick your game up a notch or two. But no – the screen writer (or brain dead turtle I can’t tell) who wrote this mess needed the creature out of the way for a while – can’t have anything interesting going on screen can we. No.

Meantime Matt and Maria Pillito are filling up screen time with their pointless relationship. Maria plays a newswoman who works for a jerk –she-loves-matt-but-wanted-to-have-a-carreer-so-it-didn’t-work-out-but-she-still-loves-him ( the clichés in this film lumber along in huge slow herd like that of the brontosaurs in Jurassic park if they were walking waist deep in thick mud– this movie is a bit of twist on the snark “what is good is not original and what is original is not good” in this case it’s “what is original is not good, and what is not original is also not good” – and Matt tries to figure out why the creature is in New York (they were trying to be realistic – for example they eliminated the fire breath because that ‘wasn’t realistic” . A fifty meter tall two legged Iguana with a lateen jaw is realistic? Really when you got that having it breathe fire isn’t that much of a stretch.) And starts doing some tests.

Meantime (like I said I only saw the film once so the chronology may be a bit off and I would rather tear my own eyes out and eat them like grapes before I see this film again) the creature has an encounter with Three helicopters that it chases through the canyons of New York – this was intended to be one of the main sequences of the film – the one problem with the sequence is whoever wrote it forgot helicopters can go up – there was no reason for them to start flying around low enough for the creature to catch them and if it did start chasing them they would just go UP jackass. It’s the contempt for the audience that this sequence reveals “the little geeks will never notice” BS that is insulting as hell.

Anyway – Matt then finds out that Godzilla is ‘gasp’ pregnant – this was the moment I wanted to rip my chair in the theater off the floor and hurl it at the screen while screaming obscenities. Not quite as big stupid as the Bolero Ecstasy neon sign moment – it was pretty damn close. I mean sweet Jesus this is the best god damn thing you could come up with? Pregnant? If I could stand it – which I couldn’t – I would use this as an example of thinking-you’re-smarter-than-everybody-else and yet being dumber than a bag of hammers lazy ass screen writing. Pregnant . After my initial anger ebbed I found myself sinking into a grim and black despair – watching this film became an exercise in soul killing misery – I felt profoundly wronged by this film, my intelligence was insulted and high hopes I had had for this film dashed, and I was forced to watch a character that I had been a fan of most of my life have his name attached to shallow noisy fish eating mockery of a himself and made absurd by cats too cool for the room. (Did I mention that I hate this film?)

The last hour of the film – yes the last fucking hour of the film deals with a) the discovery that the creature has laid its eggs in Madison Square Garden – 1,000s of them – and then vanished – there is some nonsense with a submarine that the creature swims away form (well at least it is a variation on running away I’ll give them that). The eggs hatch instantly – fire breath is not realistic – eggs the size of a phone booth hatching instantly that’s realistic – good. Glad I’m clear on that. Matt, Maria, the French guy (Jean Reno who wisely stays in shadows during most of his shots, some French guys for the little creatures to eat and someone else spend most of the rest of the time running around Madison Square being menaced and eaten in some cases by the baby creatures.

The whole thing was a complete and boring rip off of the velocoraptors in Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park II. Now Brian De Palma can do some really lazy hack work – and one of this trade marks is to pay homage (rip off) a sequence from another film in his films – in The Untouchables (that he tired his best to wreck) he has something like the famed Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1925) – Now I hated that but at least Brain had the taste to take a classic moment in film, and a film that was 60 years old – these fuckwits ripped off a film everybody had just seen. And badly at that. You didn’t care. No not quite true you wanted the little creatures to eat all of these annoying people and end the film.

That doesn’t happen – in a heroic moment Matt manages to get an air strike on the Garden (about the 12,343 time in cinema history a scientist does this – but fire breath well that’s not realistic) and blows up all the little creatures. At that point the momma creature returns and then tries to kill Matt and the rest – people where saying yes yes Kill kill! As the chase went on – none of us were happy. Eventually they mange to get the creature out in the open on the Brooklyn Bridge where two missiles kill it. Another chair ripping moment “that’s it? Sweet mother of pearl the creature of the black lagoon took more punishment than that. God can’t they do anything right? It was like killing jaws with a feather for fucks sake.

In the end the film was an odd kind of Viet nam allegory – a French problem (it was their Nukes) that if it wasn’t stopped would over run the world (the eggs in MSG the Domino theory) and in order to defeat it we need to lure it out in open where our air power can destroy it (the idea behind the US search and destroy patrols in nam were to draw fire and then call down the wrath of god upon the VC/ The creature like the VC spent a lot of time hiding underground – which isn’t really iguana behavior come to think of it – but fire breath isn’t realistic).

While the film made money – 375 million or something world wide – it was considering how much money had been spent on it and the millions on promotion it was a big disappointment for Sony – who when the clowns who made this film wanted to do a sequel were told sure as long you have a budget half of what you spent on this mess. They declined and went on to do that stupid movie about ice covering America (the day after tomorrow were in the new York city public library they burn the books for warmth but not the wooden tables which just may have burned longer – nice to see they are as hip to the real world as always.) Sony realizing they would be facing a hugely hostile audience of angry fan boys who would trash the living shit out the film every damn chance they got eventually canned the sequel. Hell Sony’s trying to make money here they decided it wasn’t worth a sequel.

Toho loathed the film so much that they re-launched their Godzilla series culminating in Godzilla final wars where – as shown in the pic - the creature from the American film (now offically called Zilla – not Godzilla) meets Godzilla in battle. Godzilla destroys it in 10 seconds – causing the alien who is commanding all the world’s monsters in battle against Godzilla to yell “I knew I couldn’t rely on that fish eating monster”

It was a huge FU from Toho to the people who made this film – of which there will never be a sequel (praise Jesus) as Sony’s rights to Godzilla have lapsed. And fitting place to end this.

Out of town for the weekend so no blog until Monday.

Peace, Love, Atomic breath.
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