Review of Godzilla (1998) by Nick P — 03 Jun 2014

This is a movie which is generally thought of as the typical lowest-common-denominator, brainless, soulless Hollywood blockbuster of its time. It's curious to watch it with today's equivalents in mind, such as Transformers or (most relevantly) the new Godzilla film, because there's a major difference in ethos. There's a sense of humour, fun and humanity which is wholly lacking in many of today's blockbusters, and particularly Godzilla 2014. You could make a case for today's culture in some way robbing us of the lighter touch, and bludgeoning us with the sense that a film or show needs to be hyper-earnest and gritty to be relevant. G98 is not a film in which main characters die or suffer emotional trauma, it's one in which a wannabe journalist gets hit on by her egomaniac boss, and is led by "the worm guy" with a name nobody can pronounce.

So I really do think that big, dumb films like this can make for a telling barometer of cultural progression, and fundamental filmmaking principals over time.

Anyway. None of this means it's a great film, obviously it isn't. It's *hugely* derivative of King Kong and the first two Jurassic Parks, some peripheral characters are 100% superfluous to the plot and waste any screentime they occupy, some of the CG rendering looks decidedly ropey.

Godzilla drops out of the plot for an extended sequence involving its offspring, resulting in a seemingly endless chase from obviously-not-really-there and thoroughly unlikeable critters. The film's pacing is mostly better than many of today's movies, but that particular section kills the film in my opinion.

There's also a very weird sense of ambivalence, regarding what we're supposed to feel. 'Zilla' (Toho's recent retcon) is a very likeable monster, and is treated sympathetically. We have extended eye contact with it, it seems reasonably friendly and smart, its main motivation seems to be a love of fish, and it's not intrinsically malevolent - its main sin is just being way too big for the environment. When it arrives at the city, its appearances are called "attacks", when it's actually just wandering from A to B (at which point it vanishes underground and doesn't hurt anyone). They even point out in the film, most of the damage to the city is caused by the military, in Team America style.

So then we have the human contingent. Nobody points out the issue of calling Zilla's strolls "attacks", and nobody - not even the reasonably likeable lead cast - suggests an alternative to killing this new and awesome species of creature. The military are gung-ho and kill-kill-kill, but that's not portrayed as the stupid or short-sighted thing to do.

It feels like the writer and director couldn't make up their minds about what they wanted the film to be, and came up with a confused screenplay. This ambivalence reaches a crisis point in the ending scene, in which the characters' emotions are polar opposites of the audience's gut reaction (or mine, at least), leaving a very sour final impression.

Still, it's quite a fun movie. I enjoyed it more than Godzilla 2014, and a little more than Pacific Rim.

Sidenote - G98 has a soundtrack album which I have always found utterly baffling, because it's filled with songs that I can't hear anywhere in the movie. Kept waiting for Jamiroquai's Deeper Underground to pop up somewhere, then finally resigned myself to thinking it'd be in the end credits, but no, that's Puffy's horrendous Come With Me and a boring Bowie cover. Were these songs originally used as temp tracks somewhere? Does anyone know? SO CONFUSED.