Godzilla

There comes a time in every actor’s life where he must say “No! I will not say that dialogue!” There were times that Elijah Wood should have said it in the last movie I reviewed, Deep Impact. More than any other movie, though, Godzilla shows that this is a rule.

The boys who brought us Independence Day (Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin) have done it again. They’ve brought us a special effects laden ball of virtually nothing with small roles for everybody in Hollywood. Maybe one product placement too many ruined my experience, too. Apparently, Blockbuster paid a lot of money for this one. Just one more mistake that they made. God figure.

We all know what the plot of Godzilla is. A big monster comes in and destroys a town until the scientists can stop it. In this one, the main scientist is Dr. Niko Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick), “the worm guy.” He starts off picking up worms at Chernobyl thinking that it’s incredible that they’ve grown to something like 15% bigger. Then he’s shown Godzilla’s footprint. The worms are forgotten. Enter Audrey Timmons (Maria Pitillo) and her band of reporters. Harry Shearer plays her sexist boss and Hank Azaria is her cameraman friend. It’s not long before the Simpsons meet Godzilla. To further “complicate” things we have Jean Reno and his band of French agents who want to…do… something. They’re kind of in another movie filled with coffee jokes until about 3/4 of the way from the end.

From the first time I saw ID4 I knew that Emmerich and Devlin wanted remake Jurassic Park. Think about it: Jeff Goldblum plays the same part and makes at least two references to his role as Ian Malcolm. Spielberg wouldn’t have given it to them, so they did the next best thing, remake the inspiration for their favorite movie. They want you to know why they’re doing it, too. Nik is a weakened version of Ian. At one point he devises a plan to lure the beast out with a pile of fish. He looks at the pile and says, “That’s a lot of fish.” Dead silence for at least thirty seconds while the joke sinks in. Finally, nervous laughter from the audience (there weren’t many of us, but it was a late Wednesday showing) because we understood what was really going on. I was really expecting the fish plan to not work because Godzilla “doesn’t want to be fed, it wants to hunt.” There’s also a scene in Madison Square Garden that reminds me just a bit too much of the museum kitchen scene from the good movie.

The “homages” to Jurassic Park would have been tolerable if the script had been better. It seems that the only thing the French team could do is sit around and make jokes about how bad American coffee is and call each other Jean-Something. This also shows how the screenwriters feel about French people: they’re not very creative with their names.

There were a couple of bright spots in the movie that made it worth seeing. (Definitely not $6.50 worth, but maybe $1.50.) Maria Pitillo is quite beautiful if a little hard to accept as a newswoman. Maybe that’s why she’s been kept as a copy girl all these years. Maybe it has nothing to do with the jerk boss. Maybe she’s just too stupid! For the first time in an American version of the movie (as far as I know) we hear the real Japanese name of Godzilla: Gojira. Harry Shearer mispronounces it giving us the Americanization of the name. Also, it’s always fun to watch Matthew Broderick. There’s something very cool about his “neurotic little guy” acting. After seeing this movie I want to see him in a Woody Allen movie. I also see that (according to the IMDb) he’s up to play Inspector Gadget in an upcoming live action version of one of my favorite old cartoons. It just might work. We also get a pretty good running joke involving the mayor of New York, Mayor Ebert, and his assistant, Gene. And, yes, they do look like everyone’s favorite critics. I doubt it helped the reviews, though.

The best thing about the movie was the final battle with the monster. (I think most people know how the movie ends, but if you don’t you might want to skip this paragraph.) If the whole movie were as exciting as this scene it probably would have been a really fun movie. Even the final homage to King Kong was pretty well done. There’s only one thing I might have done differently in this scene. Throughout the movie Nik had seemed like he was in awe of the monster. Not just because it was a huge beast, but because it was a new species created inadvertently by man. He seemed to almost want it to live. As the planes are blasting the monster for the last time he’s watching the monster almost with tears in his eyes. I expected him to say “I’m sorry” just before the final blasts hit. It may have added a little bit of poetry to an otherwise banal movie. Then again, maybe they figured that Broderick’s expression was enough. And maybe it was.

Basically, we get the same movie that we got on July 4, 1996, just on a smaller scale, without as much excitement and in dire need of someone like Will Smith. More great promos, though. These guys are masters at that. The problem with their tagline (Size Does Matter) is that it’s caused at least two movies to use the less inspired Size Doesn’t Matter.

By the way, we’re not out of the woods yet. I hear the Matthew has signed on for two or three sequels. NNNNNOOOOOOO!!!!!!! GOD, WHYYYYYYY!?!?!?!?