A risible monster
There has been some debate as to what, exactly, is a Godzilla. To be bookish about it, Godzilla is a mixture of the Japanese words for gorilla and whale.
Godzilla was the mutant result of an H-bomb test and first made his appearance in a 1954 Japanese film directed by Tomoyuki Tanaka - who killed off the monster at the end. However, you cannot keep a good lizard down and Godzilla has been rampaging for Japanese studio Toho through 22 movies ever since (he has even taken on King Kong).
Here is the rub, or rubber: Godzilla has always been played by a man in a lizard suit. Cheap, yes, but funny and kitsch at the same time, entrancing millions of fans worldwide. Sometimes, however, Hollywood does not quite get it. It has taken more than 10 years for Sony to come up with an American Godzilla - coincidentally, the country's biggest release on 7,000-plus screens - and its German director, Roland Emmerlich (Independence Day) has completely missed the point.
Emmerlich has thrown out the rubber suit and brought in computer graphics. Fair enough, but Godzilla is mostly shot in the dark or the rain, which is the oldest trick in the book to disguise substandard SFX, and even then you see only a tail or a claw at a time. The script is risible. And the whole film is clunky and cynical, which is especially disappointing when you realise it is aimed at young audiences. Surely they deserve something better? More cynical even than Independence Day - which at least was funny - Godzilla is one of those massive Hollywood pictures which will make a profit no matter what. Godzilla is a textbook case of blanket coverage, and it will be hard to find a cinema not screening it. But this film will leave a bad taste in the mouth: who really wants to be taken for dumb, even by the dream machine? Godzilla, written by Emmerlich's Independence Day partner Dean Devlin, opts for standard set-up devices: attacks at sea, blips on radar screens, and corny dialogue like 'I don't know how something that big can disappear so quickly!' A cast of stock characters is quickly chucked at the audience before Godzilla starts to rampage through Manhattan: we have Matthew Broderick in the alleged lead as Niko Tatopoulos, an expert in the mutant earthworms of Chernobyl who insists Godzilla is a girl.
It has to be said Broderick is not the most interesting of actors, and here he is not given the most interesting of parts. Worse lies in store, however, for Maria Pitillo as a TV newswoman and Hank Azaria (Birdcage) as a determined cameraman, never mind Michael Lerner gamely struggling as New York's Mayor Ebert, who is foolishly against evacuating the city, etc, etc.
The military bombards the monster with its slings and arrows, and there is also a French force led by Leon's Jean Reno - the nastiest shock of the movie came when I realised the fine actor had descended to this level. The meanderings of Godzilla's plot and its eventual outcome will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen a disaster movie before, and it makes you hanker for the good old days of Jurassic Park.
It is hard to imagine that films can possibly come more cynically packaged than this. The only possibly positive result of Emmerlich's outing is that fans of campy old Godzilla will clamour for his rebirth and, this time next year, we will be laughing at the man in the rubber suit again. In the meantime, good luck.
Godzilla opens June 18 on the Edko circuit
