GODZILLA

Godzilla (1998)
Centropolis Entertainment / Fried Films / Independent Pictures / TriStar Pictures
Director: Roland Emmerich
Also known as: Some people like to style it in all caps, as GODZILLA, presumably just because that’s what it looks like on the poster. It’s not well liked by the core Godzilla fan community, and some refer to it as GINO – Godzilla In Name Only. Which is harsh, but within a couple of years Toho would be saying the same thing in their actual films.

Four years came and went with no TriStar Godzilla movie. When they’d formally confirmed that pre-production was underway in 1994, the director attached to the project was Jan de Bont, a Dutch hotshot who’d made his directorial debut earlier that year with the summer phenomenon Speed (1994). He’d also been a cinematographer on such action milestones as Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt for Red October (1990), so he looked like a good choice for a muscular American take on Godzilla. He'd taken on board the substantial briefing document provided by Toho and had come up with a storyline that met with general approval. Unfortunately, the budget he presented was too rich for TriStar’s parent company, Sony, and he walked away from the project at the end of the year. Godzilla spent all of 1995 in Development Limbo.

In mid-1996, TriStar brought in the director/producer team of Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin. Emmerich and Devlin had scored a hit with Stargate (1994) and were about to enjoy even greater success with Independence Day (1996), both of which they’d also co-scripted. Their participation was conditional on them being allowed to ignore Toho’s document as well as the earlier scripts and handle the story and the kaiju in their own way. They would retain the idea of Godzilla being mutated by the fallout from nuclear weapons tests, but would steer clear of the more fantastic elements of de Bont’s storyline and instead present Godzilla in a way more grounded in reality, as a flesh-and-blood animal with its roots in the real world. The concept designs for this new Godzilla met with a frosty reception at a meeting with representatives of Toho, but they signed off on it nonetheless. TriStar greenlit Emmerich and Devlin’s script at the turn of 1997 and filming completed that year, in plenty of time for a summer blockbuster release in 1998. Marketing for the movie was extremely coy about what its titular star would look like...

The opening credits play over a grainy montage of historical nuclear test footage, supposedly set in French Polynesia, intercut with shots of iguanas and their eggs on beaches, again supposedly in French Polynesia. (Iguanas are native to the Americas, not the South Pacific – the largest native reptiles French Polynesia boasts are geckos and sea turtles.) In the present day, a Japanese tuna fishing vessel is sunk by a large animal with claws and a tail. The only survivor, the ship’s cook, is taken to a hospital in Tahiti, where he’s visited by a French man who asks him what he saw. He repeats the name “Gojira”.

(This is an obvious homage to the destruction of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru in Godzilla (1954), except that instead of being blasted with radioactive energy, the ship is mauled. Online sources claim the ship is called the Kobayashi Maru – it’s possible one of the crew might be saying this when he makes an emergency call over the ship’s radio, but it’s never clearly named on-screen. The name “Kobayashi Maru” in an American genre script would, of course, be a Star Trek reference. In the world of Star Trek, the civilian spaceship Kobayashi Maru is the subject of a training exercise for Starfleet officers. That the exercise is famously impossible to win could suggest some sort of comment here on global nuclear politics, but I think it’s more likely someone simply reached for the first ship name with “Maru” on the end that they could think of.)

Not much later, American biologist Nick Tatopoulos is airlifted out of Ukraine by helicopter and flown to Panama. There he’s introduced to paleontologist Dr Chapman, who simultaneously disparages him and lusts after him, and the ineffectual Dr Craven, who reports on the attack on the Japanese ship. Nick has been studying the long-term effects of radiation on earthworms in the grounds of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, but has been brought to Panama to investigate the traces of a much larger radioactive mutant. Those traces include a trail of three-toed footprints ten metres across and another mauled fishing ship in Jamaica. As Nick recovers organic samples from the wrecked ship, he’s watched by the French man who is posing as an insurance investigator. Soon after that, three fishing trawlers are pulled underwater off the Eastern seaboard of the USA. Dr Chapman suggests the creature responsible could be a species of dinosaur that’s survived, undiscovered, into the present era, but Nick believes, based on its radioactive spoor and its first sighting near Tahiti, that it’s the result of mutation caused by past French nuclear tests in the area.

In New York, Nick’s former college sweetheart Audrey Timmonds is working in the WIDF news office, hoping to get a break as a TV reporter and fending off the predatory advances of anchorman Charles Caiman. She’s having lunch at a diner with her married friends, fellow office admin Lucy Palotti and cameraman Victor Palotti, when the gigantic creature makes landfall and strides through the city, disrupting a re-election rally by the city’s Mayor Ebert and causing widespread damage. Victor manages to get close-up footage of the creature, which is used in Caiman’s report of the incident and the subsequent looting and evacuation of central New York.

This is where we get our first good look at the new Godzilla. It looks and moves a bit like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park (1993), albeit much larger and with an extremely overdeveloped lower jaw. It lacks the familiar row of large dorsal plates, although it has rows of smaller plates down either side of its back. It walks bipedally but hunched over. It moves deliberately in these early scenes, but is capable of greater speed and agility when threatened. Barring some human-scale effects shots, it’s entirely computer generated.

Audrey recognises Nick from coverage of his team arriving to investigate. She’s unable to get Caiman to take her seriously when she says she knows someone with inside information about the creature, but ends up using Caiman’s ID to get access to the evacuated area.

The French man and his team of four have also arrived in New York and planted a bug on Mayor Ebert, allowing them to eavesdrop on his briefing with Colonel Hicks. The creature has disappeared following its grand entrance – the response team believe it’s hiding in Manhattan and are keen to stop it roaming any further. Nick suggests baiting the creature into the open with fresh tuna, based on its previous targets. Sure enough, it bursts out of the sewers near Madison Square and heads for the fish, but makes a prompt getaway when the military open fire. (When it turns and roars at a brace of pursuing ground vehicles, they’re engulfed in flames, which is as close as this film gets to paying tribute to Godzilla’s classic atomic breath.) The city is further damaged by a combination of monster rampage and stray artillery.

Audrey finds Nick and follows him to a mobile operation centre where he pregnancy-tests a blood sample from the creature. (Notwithstanding the test is positive and Nick starts talking about asexual reproduction, he continues to refer to Godzilla as “he”.) Left alone in the tent, Audrey finds video footage of the Japanese sailor in Tahiti and the giant footprints in Panama, which she uses as the basis for a journalistic report that she hopes will secure her a better job at WIDF. However, Caiman records over her report and takes the credit for it, mangling the sailor’s repeated “Gojira” and renaming the creature “Godzilla”.

Nick is unable to persuade the army to devote resources to searching for a hypothetical nest of Godzilla eggs while they’re focussing on the adult creature. He’s also thrown out of the response team when the stolen video footage is broadcast. He’s almost immediately picked up by the French man, who introduces himself as Philippe Roche, an agent of the Direction Générale des Services Extérieures.

(The actual French overseas intelligence service is the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure – the scriptwriters got the acronym right, anyway. Although Philippe clearly says “Roche”, which is a plausible French surname, in the credits it’s given as “Roaché”, which isn’t. Colonel Hicks sees his insurance investigator ID and pronounces it “Roach”, which is a plausible insult from a bad-tempered American soldier. It’s almost certainly a pseudonym – his four-man team all have hyphenated names beginning with “Jean”, which is so absurdly hyper-French it can only be a cover.)

Philippe wants Nick’s help to find the nest. He’s concerned that, if the situation escalates, Godzilla’s origins could be tied back to French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. Disguised as American soldiers, the French team and Nick enter the New York subway network, followed by Victor, who saw Nick being abducted, and Audrey. While Godzilla is lured away by another abortive military trap and escapes into the Hudson River, the French team find hundreds of eggs beneath the Madison Square Garden sports stadium, each more than two metres tall. The eggs begin to hatch and the humans escape into the lower levels of the stadium. The man-sized Godzillas take down Philippe’s team as they forage through the stadium complex for food. Nick, Philippe, Audrey and Victor manage to reach the broadcast control booth, from which they’re able to transmit a message calling for the army to launch an airstrike to prevent the creatures from spreading and multiplying. They flee the building seconds before it’s destroyed.

Before they can celebrate, Godzilla emerges from the ruined stadium, evidently displeased at finding its children dead. The four commandeer a taxi and escape, hotly pursued by Godzilla. They lead it onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where it becomes tangled in the suspension cables and is an easy target for the military’s F-18s. Philippe slips away with Victor’s camera footage, which he promises to return after he’s edited his team out of it. Audrey, now in demand as a reporter, quits WIDF and heads home with Nick. Unseen by anyone, in the wrecked basement of the stadium, one final Godzilla egg hatches.

The main theme of kaiju fan complaints about this film is that Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin didn’t “get” Godzilla. Steve Ryfle in particular, in his book Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star, offers a curated selection of quotes from interviews with Devlin that make him sound dismissive or even contemptuous of the Japanese Godzilla movies, with the clear implication that he was entirely the wrong person to take on this project. Conversely, in the behind-the-scenes bonus material on the DVD release, Devlin talks about the happy childhood hours he spent watching those old movies. (Emmerich, on the other hand, is clearly just not a fan.) It’s not that he wasn’t familiar with them or didn’t like them, he says, it’s just that he didn’t want to copy them, he wanted to do something different. One might fairly ask why he insisted on using the title Godzilla and didn’t just produce his own film, and doubtless the monetary advantages of brand recognition are a part of the answer. But still, I don’t think it’s wrong of him or Emmerich to remark on the flaws of the Japanese movies or to have wanted to do their own thing.

On its own terms, as a formulaic, family-friendly action blockbuster about a giant mutated iguana, I think the 1998 Godzilla gets a lot right. It even has some features in common with better kaiju movies. The opening credits sequence neatly anticipates Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014) and its sequels. The street-level effects shots and chases through the streets of Manhattan give scale and drama in exactly the same way as equivalent shots in Gamera: The Guardian of the Universe (1995) and Gamera 2 (1996). The realisation of Godzilla and its velociraptor-like offspring through CGI is both a triumph and a failing: the film simultaneously benefits from all the development work put in by the makers of Jurassic Park (1993) and its sequel The Lost World (1997) and sets itself up for inevitable negative comparisons and comments about diminishing returns. And didn’t Godzilla vs Destoroyah (1995) and Gamera 2 both just do that same sequence of people being picked off by small kaiju in an underground complex... but with more interesting monsters?

One possible reason why the film doesn’t quite land is the comedy. This isn’t to say comedic business isn’t welcome in giant monster movies. Gamera 2 parodied news coverage of its narrative too, although it didn’t site several major characters in the newsroom. Mayor Ebert and his assistant Gene – famously named after film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel in retaliation for their panning of Emmerich and Devlin’s previous films – are the kind of lightweight comic relief characters who often pop up in Japanese kaiju eiga. The endless business with characters mangling Nick’s surname wouldn’t be out of place either – he shares a name with Patrick Tatopoulos, who provided the film’s creature designs, so I suspect the name and the manglings are an in-joke. The repeated digs by the French characters at the expense of American coffee are fine too. But stick them all together and the overall tone of the movie starts to feel more heavily weighted towards comedy.

I think the casting gives a further indication that the filmmakers had their tongues in their cheeks: three of the four actors that I would guess viewers are most likely to recognise are known for their comedy roles. Hank Azaria (Victor) and Harry Shearer (Caiman) are both prominent members of the Simpsons (1989-present) voice cast, and Shearer’s also well-known as one of the stars of the music mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Matthew Broderick (Nick) was probably still best known in 1998 (and may still be today!) for his star turn in the teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Notable entries in his filmography to either side of this movie include the Jim Carrey vehicle The Cable Guy (1996) and the ill-advised live-action Inspector Gadget (1999). The fourth, Jean Reno (Philippe), may have been more of an action movie star, coming to America’s attention as the eponymous assassin in the Luc Besson film Léon (1994) and swiftly landing a role in Mission: Impossible (1996), but in France he’d also made a splash in the time-travel comedy Les Visiteurs (1993), a sequel to which was released in 1998.

And then there’s the poster and trailer tagline, “Size Does Matter”. With everyone so reluctant to show off the redesigned Godzilla ahead of time, the one thing that’s going to define this movie in the minds of prospective cinemagoers is a sexual innuendo.

But I wonder if its biggest flaw, its true failing, is simply that it tries to apply American cinematic standards of "realism” to Godzilla? I don’t just mean the decision to present Godzilla as some bland animal when, in the Toho movies up to this point, he’d often been more of a supernatural force and a potent symbolic entity. (I don’t know, maybe I am saying Dean Devlin didn’t “get” Godzilla...) I’m also thinking of the more theatrical standards of Japanese cinema, at least in this genre and at this time. Tragic melodrama is a key part of Godzilla’s DNA that’s entirely absent from this movie. Perhaps it would have helped to give Iguana Godzilla some personality if they’d realised it through motion capture? Apparently mo-cap was considered, but rejected precisely because it made Godzilla look like he was being portrayed by a human actor. The trouble with this film is that it was in a position to lean on Jurassic Park, which proved that creatures could be convincingly realised on-screen through CGI, but preceded that other milestone in special effects cinema, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), which similarly proved the capabilities and worth of motion capture. (And of Andy Serkis. Let’s be honest, if the TriStar Godzilla had been made in 2004, no one but Andy Serkis would have been playing the title role.) The Legendary Pictures movies would use elements of mo-cap to great effect.

Let’s talk about French nuclear weapons testing. Presumably attributing Godzilla’s mutation to American tests was never an option in an American movie, and blaming the Russians would have meant including a charismatic Russian character in the main cast, also presumably a no-no. Blaming the French meant the filmmakers could cast the highly bankable Jean Reno, a win-win situation. It’s just possible some cinemagoers might have remembered all the fuss about the 1985 sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior at harbour in New Zealand, an act of terrorism sponsored by the French government to counter the vessel’s proposed protest of nuclear tests in French Polynesia. Bear in mind, though, that this film was released about five years before America got all weird about the French because of their opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. (Who could forget the hilarity of “freedom fries”? On a related note, when Caiman is reporting on Godzilla’s first incursion into New York and describes it as the city’s biggest calamity since the World Trade Center bombing, it took me a minute to remember that he’s talking about a terrorist incident that took place in February 1993.)

France didn’t sign up to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty the Soviet Union and the USA had ratified in 1963 – the one that banned all nuclear tests except those carried out underground – and continued its nuclear weapons tests for some time after that. At the time, France was in the middle of a series of tests in Algeria, 13 of them underground and five atmospheric, that it continued under the terms of the treaty it had signed in 1962 granting Algeria its independence. When the tests had started, France had been at war with its former colonial property. Later on, it turned its attention to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, conducting 193 tests after the middle of 1966 in French Polynesia – these are the ones referenced in this film. The majority from 1975 onward were underground detonations but most prior to that were devices deployed by balloon. The last one was carried out in January 1996 – at the time Emmerich and Devlin were writing their first draft script, for all anyone knew, France might have been planning to continue its nuclear tests.

France did sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty when it was introduced at the United Nations in 1996 and ratified it in April 1998, one month before this film was released. That treaty, however, has not yet come into force because eight nations including the USA never ratified it and Vladimir Putin withdrew Russia’s ratification in 2023.

The 1998 Godzilla underperformed at the box office and was mauled by the critics, leading to the abandonment of a planned trilogy. It did, however, lead to the second American animated Godzilla series (1998-2000). In this, Godzilla’s last surviving child imprints on Nick Tatopoulos, allowing him to direct it to defend America from the predations of other monsters, not unlike the premise of the Hanna-Barbera animated Godzilla (1978-79). They even got the same actors to do the voices for Mayor Ebert, Colonel (now Major!) Hicks and Dr Craven. All of whom are second fiddle to Animated Iguana Godzilla, whose roars are provided by the guy who voiced Megatron in The Transformers (1984-87).