Godzilla (Unfortunately, The 1998 Film)

Godzilla (1998)

Runtime: 139 agonizing minutes

Directed by: Roland Emmerich

Starring: Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Maria Pitillo, Hank Azaria, Kevin Dunn

From: Tri-Star

Yes, I finally watched this film again; the last viewing was oh so long ago. I didn't like it back then and now it's even worse. Besides the reasons I listed below in my Letterboxd review, there's also the stereotyping and sometimes racism that happens with several different ethnicities (Japanese, Italian, and French); oh, French people love their baked treats and coffee and Japanese people slurp noodles and watch sumo wrestling? Lord! I'll be back tomorrow and I plan on watching something better than this.

This is another case of me watching again something that I last saw many years ago. The first viewing was back on the big screen in May of '98, where me and many others watched it and ended up with the general consensus that it isn't too good. I am sure I saw it on VHS sometime after that but it has to be at least 15 years since the last viewing. After last night, don't expect me to ever see this again.

I don't really need to recap the story of how “Godzilla” (actually a bipedal dinosaur creature that sort of looks like a T-Rex) ends up in New York City but let me make clear that if this movie had no ties at all to the Toho franchise and instead was a random movie titled something like, “A Giant Dinosaur is on the Loose in New York City” it'd still be a lousy movie for the reasons I list below.

However, when you consider that the main filmmakers of this (Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin) did not respect the original property and in fact hated it and thought those movies sucked, you get something that's a big slap in the face to all the Godzilla fans around the world, where you get an awful piece of crap worse than even Godzilla vs. Megalon and a monster that looks nothing like the original and it's quickly written crap which rips off such things as Star Wars and Jurassic Park (the latter to a far greater degree than I had remembered) and let me explain why below in a few bullet points why I only give this one star.

* The story is just not good. Nevermind how it was never adequately explained why 'Zilla decided to leave the South Pacific Ocean and ended up thousands of miles away in New York City, there are many things in the film that make zero sense; that big lizard being a burrower? No, just no. Also, if it was going to rain most of the time why wasn't this set in Seattle, where at least the stereotype is that it rains every day.

* Too much goofy humor, and most of it is not funny at all; it's more abrasive and obnoxious than anything else. The lead hero being known as “the worm guy”, and always having his Greek surname mispronounced... sigh. That leads to:

* Unappealing characters. They are either too stupid or come across as A-holes. The most blatant examples are “Mayor Ebert” and his assistant “Gene”. The filmmakers were so gravely offended Siskel & Ebert did not like their last film Independence Day that they created those two over-exaggerated buffoons and it was just so bad and petty... and they didn't even have 'Zilla kill the either of them! In terms of stupidity, a guy in a helicopter tries to avoid the dino... and never thought of flying up to get out of its reach.

* The CGI... yikes does most of it look pretty bad in 2015. I and others thought this was OK back then? I did not remember it being this bad in '98.

* This is a point brought up by someone I know who mentioned it in a review he posted last year about this film, but it's accurate: no one seems too concerned that their city just got trashed (seemingly half the damage done because of human stupidity) and suffered billions of dollars in damage. Real life events since this came out make it pretty clear they got it SO wrong here, and NYC people LOVE their city. If none of the characters care, why should I?

Like I said I don't plan on watching this ever again, as there's no need to. I could go on and on about the badness of this but I thought I summed up the biggest problems.