Godzilla (1998)

Godzilla had long enjoyed a devoted fan base in the United States and it seemed inevitable that there would be a Hollywood version one day. There had been an American animated TV series that ran between 1978 and 1980 that introduce the world to Godzooki, another of Godzilla’s offspring, and Henry G. Saperstein, who had co-financed some of the 1960s Toho films had tried for years, with no success, to interest Hollywood studios in making their version of Godzilla. Various other attempts – including a 3D project by Steve Miner, director of horror films Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Friday the 13th Part III (1982) and House (1985) – fell by the wayside until in 1992, TriStar announced that they’d acquired the remake rights from Toho and set about developing what was then planned to be a trilogy.

After passing through the hands of directors Jan De Bont it ended up with director Roland Emmerich and his regular writer Dean Devlin who were riding high on the inexplicable success of the alien invasion romp Independence Day (1996). They released their take on Godzilla in May 1998 and though it was a box office success, it was met with dismay and horror by long time Godzilla fans. It sticks to the basics set out by Toho over the decades but made so many changes that one wondered why they bothered calling it Godzilla at all.

 

During nuclear tests in French Polynesia (it’s an American film so American nuclear testings were never going to be to blame) an iguana is blasted by radiation and over time mutates into a huge monster. That is first seen attacking a Japanese fishing vessel. The creature makes its way up South America towards the States, pursued by Nuclear Regulatory Commission scientist Dr Nick Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick) and a team of French secret service agents led by Philippe Roaché (Jean Reno). It arrives in New York City and makes a mockery of all attempts to bring it to heel before its nest is discovered inside Madison Square Garden, complete with over 200 eggs, several o which hatch disgorging baby Godzillas that attack Tatopoulos and his team in a scene blatantly inspired by the raptor scenes in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). Despite its enormous size, the adult Godzilla has somehow managed to hide in the New York sewers and emerges to take its revenge for the murder of its offspring. After a noisy and curiously unexciting chase across Manhattan Godzilla becomes entangled in the cables holding up the Brooklyn Bridge and is gunned down by attacking jet fighters.

The first thing you notice about the 1998 Godzilla is that the eponymous creature doesn’t look like Godzilla at all. It doesn’t sound like it, it doesn’t move like it, nor does it behave in any way like any version of Godzilla that we’d ever seen before. It’s just a very large and angry dinosaur. So why call it Godzilla at all? Why not be brave and just make a home grown giant monster film? “Brand awareness” would be the answer offered by TriStar, the need to give audiences a name they would recognise. But when you go to such lengths to make your monster so different to Godzilla, how far will that “brand awareness” get you? Not very far it seems. The film was a box office flop and was panned by critics and fans alike.

Devlin’s stock in trade is recycled collections of clichés rather than fully formed scripts in their own right and Godzilla is no exception. There’s nothing original here at all – the design of the monster mimics the various dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the plot mixes and matches strands from Gojira (1954) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and the characters are so thinly drawn that it’s hard to remember who they are or what they’re supposed to be doing from one scene to the next. He’s perfectly complemented by Emmerich, whose bland, flavourless direction relies almost entirely on the skill of his effects crew rather than any innate style of his own. His one clever contribution is to frame Godzilla so that we only see it in its full glory in a single long shot, the rest of the time it being too big for even Ueli Steiger widescreen photography to capture in full.

The digital effects, courtesy of Centropolis Effects, are perfectly adequate but at the time, CGI was making advances on an almost monthly basis. Jurassic Park had set the bar high and by the time Godzilla was released the “wow” factor was already tarnished. We were now not only used to seeing high quality digital effects but expecting them so the fact that the American Godzilla at least looks good simply wasn’t enough. We now needed a gripping plot and characters we can care about and this Godzilla delivers neither.

What we get instead are the scientific implausibilities, ludicrous plot developments and shoddy writing that we expect from Devlin. Tatopoulos determines that this Godzilla is pregnant by using a pregnancy testing kit made for humans, he doesn’t seem to understand what “cold blooded” means and he certainly has very little clue about dinosaurs are believed to have behaved. Like Independence Day, the script for Godzilla simply glosses over any inconvenience that might get in the way of the ridiculous story.

Perhaps it would have been tolerable if, like the later Cloverfield (2008), Godzilla had simply featured a monster rampaging around New York doing all the things that Godzilla does but without actually trying to pretend that this interloper is the real thing. It’s a film guaranteed to please almost no-one – Godzilla fans were never going to accept it and for non-fans it was just another giant monster movie, slickly made, riddled with plot holes and inconsistencies and entirely lacking in anything that might make you care enough about the sequel that the final shot was threatening. In the event the planned sequels never got made.

Gareth Edwards learned to avoid many of the film’s mistakes when he made the next Hollywood Godzilla (2014), a film not without faults of its own, but at least it tried to do right by its eponymous monster. Toho were so annoyed by the American version that they promptly revived Godzilla in Gojira ni-sen mireniamu/Godzilla 2000 (1999) and featured a terribly animated (possibly deliberately so) CGI version of this film’s monster, renamed Zilla, in Gojira: Fainaru wôzu/Godzilla: Final Wars (2004), where it is disposed off with insouciant ease by the real Godzilla. And quite right too.