Original title: Gojira ni-sen mireniamu
Following the disappointment of Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla (1998), Toho decided to give in to fan demands to take the monster back and relaunch the series in its home land. With Gojira ni-sen mireniamu/Godzilla 2000: Millennium, they launched their third iteration of the series, the Millennium era, one that would take a very different tack from its predecessors. Though continuity between films in the Showa series had been, at best, tenuous, there was never much doubt that the films after the original Godzilla (1954) all featured the same monster. The Heisei series had featured much tighter continuity, particularly in the shape of the psychic Miki Saegusa, the only human character to feature in more than one film. But for the new Millennium series, no attempt at all was made at continuity, the series instead taking an anthology approach, each film standing apart from each other.
Unfortunately, this first entry is a rather mundane adventure, setting the tone for the rest of the series which was by far the least impressive of the three eras. In this film there’s a new set-up trying to keep tabs on Godzilla, the Godzilla Prediction Network. Elsewhere a team of scientists are examining a meteor that has crashed into the sea that turns out to be hiding an alien spaceship which is soon searching for traces of Godzilla’s genetic information. Godzilla itself turns up and starts to fight the aliens but they use its DNA to create the Millennian which itself mutates into Ogra and once again Tokyo goes down as the two monsters slug it out.
Yes, it’s aliens again, something we hadn’t seen at all in the Heisei series and apart from their insatiable appetite for DNA, there’s nothing particularly notable about this lot. Godzilla 2000: Millennium was a huge disappointment, as most of the Millennium series would turn out to be, a dull and thoroughly routine Godzilla adventure that felt stale and all-too-familiar, hardly the most auspicious start for a new kaiju era. Initial enthusiasm for the film may have had as much to do with the fact that it wasn’t the Roland Emmerich film as anything else and certainly it’s a lot more fun that that abomination. Which isn’t really saying very much.
The script by Hiroshi Kashiwabara (of Gojira vs. Supesugojira (1994)) and Wataru Mimura (Gojira vs. Mekagojira (1993)) feels half-finished (the film was in production just two months after the Emmerich film had been released) and is riddled with annoying comic relief and strange pronouncements which suggest that the film was shot from a first draft that still needed a lot of work. For example, at one point someone wonders “why does he [Godzilla] keep protecting us?” while at that very moment Godzilla is laying waste to downtown Tokyo and causing untold deaths. A strange way for anything to be protecting the human race… Takao Okawara’s direction feels at best perfunctory and Gojira ni-sen mireniamu is a major step down from his previous Godzilla film, the magnificent Gojira vs. Desutoroiâ (1995).
The English dub is uncommonly awful – it’s very much a parody of Godzilla and far more light hearted than the original version – but is strangely the preferable version. Stripped of 17 minutes, the shorter version flows a lot better but it failed to ignite the box office when it was released in the States in August 2000. It fared slightly better back home but was still only a moderate hit, hardly the triumphant return that Toho and the fans must have expected.
In 2014, writer Michael Schlesinger, who, uncredited, was responsible for the script of the English dub was interviewed by the SciFiJapan website and claimed that he’d written a script for a direct sequel to Gojira ni-sen mireniamu titled Godzilla Reborn, which would have pitted Godzilla against a “giant bat-like creature made of molten lava” in Hawaii and which would have been directed by Joe Dante. Apparently Sony, who held the US remake rights at this point. were interested in the idea but a change in management at the company effectively killed it.
While it was fun to see the original – the only – Godzilla back on the big screen again, Gojira ni-sen mireniamu was an inauspicious start to an era that never really plumbed the dreadful depths of the 1970s Showa films nor attained the heights of the Heisei’s Gojira vs. Desutoroiâ. It’s slickly made but the spark seemed to have gone – it fails to engage and over time proved utterly unmemorable.
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