GODZILLA
Does Size Matter?
Japan's low-budget Godzilla campfests
don't exactly aspire to be high art, which is why I didn't really
have any high expectations for the much-hyped reinterpretation
of the late Japanese producer Tomoyuki Tanaka's fire-breathing
"King of the Monsters." This new Godzilla comes
from the Irwin Allen-esque writer-director duo of Dean Devlin
and Roland Emmerich, the same filmmakers behind the idiotic but
sometimes diverting Independence Day.
When Devlin and Emmerich's names are
attached to the project, you don't expect scintillating sci-fi
on the order of Blade Runner or this past winter's underrated
Dark City.
Devlin and Emmerich make ersatz sci-fi films, as exemplified by
simplistic, shallow pieces of pyrotechnic eye candy like ID4
and now Godzilla.
Devlin and Emmerich's Godzilla
isn't totally atrocious — most of the CGI effects and set
pieces are terrific (one great extended sequence involves the
Madison Square Garden, which becomes a nesting ground for Godzilla's
offspring). Way more advanced than the look-you-can-see-all-the-zippers-on-the-rubber-suit
effects technology of the old Godzillas, the digital effects
work rejuvenates the famed monster, making him/her (Godzilla's
asexual in this remake) leaner, meaner and more menacing than
the benevolent beast who confronted campy creatures like Megalon
and the Smog Monster.
Too bad the movie surrounding this darker
Godzilla is mostly toothless. There are hints of a more intelligent
and somber picture (a la the first and least campy Godzilla,
1954's Godzilla, King of the Monsters) in the scenes involving
Jean Reno as a seen-it-all French Secret Service agent tracking
down the oversized title lizard, the mutated result of French
nuclear testing in the South Pacific. But Devlin and Emmerich's
movie is essentially about as deep as an episode of Lost in
Space. You would think with a colossal budget like the gazillions
of greenbacks Devlin and Emmerich spent on this remake (reportedly
$120 million), they would spend part of it on a satisfying, thoughtful
screenplay too. A more talented sci-fi filmmaker would have taken
this rather lighthearted Godzilla's overlong two-hour-plus
running time and done something profound with the film, like spending
time exploring themes that Devlin and Emmerich delve into only
briefly, such as the paranoia over nuclear radiation and the apocalypse
that distinguished the 1954 Godzilla.
Like the Jurassic Park movies,
especially last year's soulless Lost World, Godzilla
is dull and banal without the monsters because of the lizard king's
one-dimensional, boring foils, including a bland Matthew Broderick
as the menschier-than-Jeff Goldblum biologist protagonist and
a who's who of sitcom actors. Most of the film's running time
is wasted on a flat, sitcommy subplot involving a rekindled romance
between Broderick and college sweetheart/aspiring journalist Maria
Pitillo. Salon's Gary Kamiya put it best when he said, "The
odd thing about movies like Godzilla and Independence
Day is how unfrightening they are... In the new monster movies,
you can believe that a hundred-foot-high monster does really exist
— but you get no sense that the universe holds anything darker
than a joystick."
So does size matter? Not when the script
is kind of lousy.
© 1999 Jim Aquino