Godzilla (’98)
I was way too generous in an early write-up I did of Roland Emmerich’s “Godzilla” when I was doing mini-reviews for the original incarnation of my book I’m now working on. I liked how silly and goofy the film was. Of course, all I really knew of the Toho franchise was the Americanized version of the original film, with Raymond Burr spliced in. Over 20 years later, I cringe at this the same way I cringe at “Armageddon,” wondering how this thing went so deliriously, absurdly wrong.
When you do some digging on Emmerich’s production for Tristar Pictures, it’s clear that Emmerich had no love whatsoever for Toho’s franchise, which is as sacred to the Japanese as any franchise is to a culture, and the shotgun marriage of the director of “Independence Day” and one of the most iconic movie monsters in history was one of convenience, and hopes of dollar signs for Tristar, than a movie made out of genuine affection for the material. This is the first time I think I’ve seen the film, sans RiffTrax, since 1998, and it is an appalling work of commercialism that checks the disaster movie boxes while cynically working a formula for laughs. How they managed to stretch this thing out to 139 minutes is beyond my comprehension.
The screenplay by Dean Devlin and Emmerich, working from a previous story by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films), basically has a similar structure as Gareth Edwards’s far-superior 2014 “Godzilla,” with an title sequence that lays out how the king of the monsters came into being; the monster rising from the depths of the Earth; then Godzilla making his way onto the mainland and reeking havoc, this time in Manhattan, while scientists and the military try and stop him. Simple enough premise that Emmerich and Devlin decide needs to be “jazzed up” in the craziest damn ways possible. Again, it’s clear they have no real love for the material.
Michael Bay’s “Armageddon” is probably my least favorite film of 1998, but it’s hard not to look at Emmerich’s “Godzilla” as the worst one. The thing that stands out between the two, and connects them (and my disdain for them), is their use of humor. Michael Bay has a level of what I call “idiot humor” which basically reveals itself as a juvenile heart at the center of several of his films (his “Transformers” films reek of it). In “Armageddon,” it turns what should be a sincere end-of-the-world disaster movie into an absurd comedy where we get Ben Affleck teasing Liv Tyler with animal crackers during a supposedly tender moment; the drill team cracking wise during psychological testing for a mission; and Bruce Willis going all alpha male dad on Affleck by firing at him with a shotgun when Affleck and Tyler’s secret relationship is revealed. Yay, the end of the world is fun! “Godzilla” does the same thing (and to be fair, so did “Independence Day,” and later, “2012”), and it makes sense, but the tone Emmerich goes for here is camp and silly and doesn’t act like anything resembling a serious movie experience. The tone-setter is the first scene with Matthew Broderick’s Dr. Niko Tatopoulos when he is going to study worms just outside of Chernobyl. He’s singing to “Singin’ in the Rain,” and basically every scene looks like it’s going for laughs rather than setting up a serious scenario for the story. Part of this is the writing, but it’s also the casting of Broderick. I love him as a performer (and he’s shown he’s plenty capable of serious acting work), but I feel like Emmerich cast this film based on how his actors go for laughs rather than how they might provide weight to the silliness in the premise. That feeling permeates throughout looking at the cast in this film- Hank Azaria, Kevin Dunn, Michael Lerner (playing Mayor “Ebert,” a jab, along with his assistant Gene, at the venerable critical team taken by Emmerich and Devlin after Siskel and Ebert slammed their previous two films), Harry Shearer and Vicki Lewis- which seems like the sort of cast a filmmaker would put together for a spoof of disaster movies rather than a genuine one. The only main actor who has a more serious reputation is Jean Reno, but even he is treated as more a supporting comic relief character than a serious agent on this case. I feel like this might be the most disrespectful thing Emmerich and Devlin did in making a “Godzilla” film- they clearly did not take it seriously.
I’m sure fans of the Toho franchise can think of more disrespectful things this film does to the beloved monster, starting with completely changing his look. Zilla is basically a radioactively-enhance iguana, as implied in the hilarious title sequence. Designed by the great Patrick Tatopoulos, it’s a terrific design, but far from the iconic lizard of Toho’s series, and it doesn’t even have the iconic roar. Many props to Toho, however, for taking the lemon that Emmerich served up to them and making lemonade from it. Six years later, for their “Godzilla: Final Wars” feature, they had their original Godzilla facing off against Zilla, their re-purposed take on the Emmerich creature. (Many thanks to my friend Matthew Saliba, a kaiju fan, for making me aware of this.) That’s what filmmakers with passion do- they find something that interests them, and make it something entirely new. If nothing else came out of this disaster (although I will always go to bat for the insanity of Broderick, Reno, Azaria and Maria Pitillo driving a taxi cab off of Zilla’s tongue as comparable an image as Slim Pickens riding a nuke at the end of “Dr. Strangelove”), we can thank Emmerich for giving Toho material to poke fun at in their own, iconic series.
