Movie Review – Godzilla (1998)

Back in 1954, Japan surprised with world with the release of Gojira (Godzilla), an epic monster movie.

Born from the side effects of radiation from nuclear weapons, Godzilla was a monster of terrifying proportions and sheer power.  The monster could easily destroy an entire city and fend off almost any conventional type of an attack.  It was easy to see why Godzilla was named the King of the Monsters.

While the Godzilla film franchise dominated the Japanese market, the films tended to have a cult status here in the U.S.  People in the U.S. know about the monster and its destructive capabilities, but a small percentage actually know the Godzilla films created in Japan.

But what if there was a big-budget Godzilla film created by Hollywood, and full of familiar faces for the American audiences?

Released in 1998, Godzilla is an American telling of the classic Japanese monster.  Instead of destroying Tokyo, Osaka or Yokohama in Japan, this time the monster would terrorize and destroy parts of New York City.  Directed by Roland Emmerich, Godzilla stars Matthew Broderick as Dr. Niko Tatopoulos.  Co-starring in the film are Jean Reno as Philippe Roaché, Maria Pitillo as Audrey Timmonds, and Kevin Dunn as Colonel Hicks.

Godzilla begins by showing a series of images of nuclear weapons being tested in the tropical setting of French Polynesia.  At the end of the testing we see that a lizard’s egg was left exposed to the fallout and radiation.

Fast forward to today (1998).

In the southern Pacific Ocean, a Japanese cannery ship is suddenly attacked by a monster of incredible size.  The attack on their vessel is deliberate.  The ship is easily crushed by the beast, and it looks like everybody is killed in the attack.

On the other side of the world, Dr. Niko Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick) is in Chernobyl, Ukraine and studying the effects of nuclear radiation on earthworms.  He’s discovered that the radiation has caused the worms to grow to larger sizes.  While he’s researching the worms, suddenly Tatopoulos is visited by an official (Glenn Morshower) from the U.S. State Department.  Tatopoulus is told that he’s being reassigned with a new assignment, something that requires his immediate attention.

In a hospital in Tahiti, it turns out that there was a lone survivor from the Japanese cannery ship.  When a mysterious French doctor asks the survivor what he saw, the survivor merely replies, “Gojira.”

Tatopoulos soon lands in Panama and meets Colonel Hicks (Kevin Dunn).  Hicks leads Tatopoulos to a sample that he needs to analyze, a sample that turns out to be a massive footprint in the ground.  Since the ground is indicating a small presence of radiation, Tatopoulos was brought in to analyze it and determine what type of a creature could have left behind such a set of footprints.  At the field headquarters, Tatopoulos works with Dr. Elsie Chapman (Vicki Lewis), and the two of them try to solve the puzzle of the mysterious creature.  It’s there at the field headquarters where the team receives a video from a French research team, and they learn of the attack on the Japanese cannery ship and the interview with its lone survivor.

The research team then arrives in Jamaica where they investigate a container ship that was discovered wrecked on a beach.  The problem is that the container ship has massive scratch and claw marks on the sides of it.  It’s also noted that the ship was carrying cans of seafood as part of its cargo.  In Jamaica, the team briefly meets with a French insurance investigator named Philippe Roaché (Jean Reno).  He claims that he’s there to investigate the ship, but we know that there’s more to his story as we also saw him interviewing the lone survivor in the hospital in Tahiti.

Off the eastern coast of the United States, a few fishing trawlers suddenly stop in the water as if they’ve snagged an underwater object.  The ships are then quickly pulled underwater, forcing the crew to abandon ship.

As the research team is flying back to the U.S., Colonel Hicks is growing concerned as the pattern of attacks and sightings is tracking the mysterious creature to the continental U.S.  But what is it?  Tatopoulos surmises that the nuclear radiation from the testing area in French Polynesia has caused a creature to mutate to gigantic proportions, making it the first of its kind in existence.

In New York City, Audrey Timmonds (Maria Pitillo) is a fledging underling stuck working for one of the top reporters at her news station.  She has been his investigator and fact finder for several years now, and it’s apparent that she is not going to advance and become a reporter like she’s always dreamed.  Audrey is bummed about her career and complains about it to her friends, Lucy (Arabella Field) and Victor Palotti (Hank Azaria).  Victor happens to be a cameraman at the same news station as Audrey, so he knows exactly what she’s complaining about.

Out on one of the docks, a fisherman (Ralph Manza) goes fishing in the East River as he does each day.  This day he casts his rod and is surprised when something grabs his line.  Something big takes the bait.  The fishing pole is yanked out of the fisherman’s hands, and he sees a massive creature moving towards him.  The fisherman runs back and barely makes it off the pier before the creature (Godzilla) rises from the East River and wanders into New York City.

As expected, it’s complete chaos and carnage as Godzilla begins walking through the city, destroying cars and trucks and whatever stands in his way.  Even the monster’s mighty tail constantly swipes the edges of buildings and causes more damage.  Nobody is safe from Godzilla.

New York City Mayor Ebert (Michael Lerner) is giving a speech outside of City Hall when everybody feels the ground rumbling.  Soon it’s clear that the rumbling is caused by Godzilla.  Everybody panics and flees, and Mayor Ebert is whisked away to safety.

We see more reactions as people discover Godzilla walking through one of the world’s greatest cities.  Cameraman Victor Palotti doesn’t waste the opportunity for some exclusive footage.  He grabs a camera and runs outside to photograph the monster, but he’s nearly stepped on by Godzilla.  Fortunately for Victor, he was between the monster’s toes and not physically harmed.

The army quickly sets up a mobile command center in New Jersey, just across the river from New York City.  Colonel Hicks takes command of the operation, and his research team from Panama and Jamaica is right there with him.  Colonel Hicks’s assistant is Sergeant O’Neal (Doug Savant).  The colonel is informed that Manhattan is being evacuated, but they also lost track of Godzilla.  The monster the size of a building is nowhere to be found in a rainy and foggy New York City.

It’s believed that Godzilla may be hiding inside one of the buildings.  Or, even worse, the monster may be tunneling underground.  It’s soon discovered that, yes, Godzilla is capable of tunneling underground.  How that’s possible of a monster of that size, we’ll never know.

So how do you fight against an incredibly large and powerful creature that has burrowed underneath New York City?  Tatopoulos’s idea is to find a way to draw Godzilla out into the open.  Knowing that Godzilla had attacked a cannery ship along with a cargo ship full of seafood, he proposes an idea of using a ton of seafood to bring the monster out into the open.

The army hauls in a ton of seafood and places it on a street in Manhattan.  Manhole covers are then removed so the smell of the fish will attract the monster.

The trick works.

Godzilla crawls to the surface and emerges by the huge pile of fish.  The monster comes face to face with Tatopoulos, but he doesn’t attack him.  When he reaches the pile of fish, Colonel Hicks orders that the army opens fire on the monster.  The military’s weapons do not harm Godzilla, but they accidentally destroy the Flatiron Building standing in the background.  Godzilla then runs through the city and three Apache helicopters follow him in a hilariously bad scene.  The choppers cause more collateral damage as they cannot his the monster, and the Chrysler Building is also accidentally destroyed.

The chase scene ends when Godzilla turns the tables and goes on the attack, ultimately destroying all three helicopters and their terrible gunners and pilots.

After Godzilla wins the battle against the army and goes back into hiding, Tatopoulos acts on a hunch and purchases some pregnancy tests at a local pharmacy.  While at the pharmacy he runs into Audrey Timmonds, his old girlfriend from their days in college.  The two of them reconnect while Niko uses the samples of Godzilla’s blood with the pregnancy tests.  Sure enough, the gigantic monster tests positive, indicating that the monster may be building a nest and laying eggs.  When Niko leaves to inform the research team about this discovery, Audrey sees the top secret video tape about Godzilla’s attack on the Japanese fishing ship as well as the footprints in Panama, and she steals it.

Audrey has Victor video tape her making a report about Godzilla, and uses the top secret tape as part of her special report.  When she shows this exclusive report to her boss, her boss turns around and lets a different news reporter use her report and top secret footage.  When this news story airs in the mobile command center, Niko Tatopoulos is kicked off the team as he allegedly let a reporter use top secret footage.

Tatopoulos returns to his tent to collect his gear and leave.  Audrey is waiting there and trying to apologize for using him, but he doesn’t want to hear any of it.  As far as he’s concerned his trusted friend betrayed him.  He takes a cab to the airport, but he’s surprised when the cab takes him to a different location instead.  The cab driver is Agent Philippe Roaché (Jean Reno) of the Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), France’s external intelligence agency.  Roaché’s team from the DGSE has been tracking Godzilla from Tahiti, and they’ve also been spying on Mayor Ebert and keeping tabs of what the officials in the U.S. are doing about the monster, a monster that originated from the testing of French nuclear weapons.

Inside of the DGSE’s secret headquarters, Tatopoulos studies a map and believes he knows where to start looking for Godzilla’s hidden nest of eggs.  The team then heads out and begins searching underground for the nest.  Outside of the headquarters building, Victor Palotti is spying on Niko when he overhears their plans.  He heads back to his apartment and convinces Audrey to go with him and secretly follow and document the DGSE’s hunt for Godzilla’s nest.

While the two groups of people are underground, Godzilla crawls back to the surface and heads towards a fish trap located in Central Park.  It’s another ambush set by the army.  The monster detects the trap and the army opens fire.  Once again there’s chaos and a ton of collateral damage in the city as the army hits everything but the monster the size of a building.

Godzilla dives into the East River, but the navy has several submarines waiting for the monster.  One of the submarines is destroyed by Godzilla, but another one successfully hits the monster with a pair of torpedoes.  Godzilla is incapacitated and everybody believes that it is dead.

Meanwhile, the DGSE team discovers Godzilla’s secret nest inside of Madison Square Garden.  Inside the arena are not dozens but instead hundreds of eggs.  The French commandos begin placing explosives on the eggs in a move to destroy them all at once, but the eggs begin to hatch.  Out of the eggs pop miniature versions of Godzilla, each of the reptiles standing about nine feet tall and incredibly strong and lethal.  It’s an all-out battle as the team races to find cover from the lizards.

Most of the DGSE commandos are killed by the lizards.  Tatopoulos and Roaché run into Audrey and Victor, and the four of them seek shelter inside of the arena’s broadcast booth.  Audrey is able to send a message to her boss and allow her to air a live special report.  Audrey does so and shows images of the lizards inside of MSG, warning both the people of New York City and the military of the immediate threat.  The military understands the message and Colonel Hicks orders an air strike on Madison Square Gardens.

The group of four barely makes it outside of Madison Square Gardens before a squadron of F-18 Hornets uses air-to-ground missiles to destroy the arena.  The entire building is destroyed and all of the lizards are killed.

Except for one really big lizard.

Godzilla rises from the wreckage of Madison Square Garden and notices that all of the hatchlings are dead.  The monster sets its sights on the four humans in front of it, and it starts to chase them.  The four people use a cab to race around the city and try to evade the monster.  They ultimately drive onto the Brooklyn Bridge where Godzilla becomes entangled in the bridge’s steel cables.  As the monster is trapped, the F-18s use more missiles to kill Godzilla.

Godzilla is finally dead and the city can start the process of clearing the damage and rebuilding.  Niko Tatopoulos feels sad for the creature when he sees it lying on the bridge.  Niko and Audrey become a couple again, and Audrey quits her job with the news company.  It’s implied that she’s going to take her exclusive story and use her celebrity status to become a journalist for a different news company.

Godzilla ends by revealing that one of the eggs still remained in the wreckage at the Madison Square Garden.  The egg cracks open and a lizard pops out just as the end credits appear.

So is 1998’s Godzilla film a good movie?

Nope.  Not by a long shot.

This is a terrible Godzilla movie that has failure written all over it.  It’s also filled with embarrassing cringe moments, and you’ll probably be doing several facepalms during the battle scenes.

For starters, this film begins with a series of clichés seen in most monster movies.  There’s an attack here, evidence of a monster there, evidence of another attack in another location, and a glimpse of yet another attack a short while later.  Been there, done that.  In the case of this film, not only is that pattern easily predictable, but it’s also incredibly boring as there is no “wow factor” or anything unique in this story.  I’ve seen better introductions on cheesy, made-for-TV films on the Syfy channel.

Yes, it’s really that lame in Godzilla.

Why in the world did Godzilla choose New York City of all places for its nesting ground?  It could have found a ton of food and shelter in pretty much any coastal city in the country, from Seattle to San Diego to Houston to Miami to Boston.  What drew the monster to New York City?  Anything at all?

Speaking of the monster, just what in the hell was that creature on the screen?  It sure as hell was NOT Godzilla!  It wasn’t even close to looking like the classic monster or acting the way it did in all of those Japanese films.  What we have here in 1998’s Godzilla is a complete abomination and mockery of one of the greatest monsters in the history of cinema.

And that creature on the screen could tunnel, too?!?

We’re meant to believe that a creature the size of a skyscraper can not only easily run around buildings and chase helicopters, but it can also dig underground?  Yeah, right.

Let’s take a look at the military in this film and see how it fails.

First of all we have a colonel taking command of an operation so big and important that it should have been commanded by at least a two-star general.  We’re talking about stopping a powerful monster here, and not going after a cell of terrorists.  Godzilla is capable of destroying entire cities at a time.  Obviously the *real* military would have had somebody ranked a lot higher than a colonel running this operation.

And what’s the deal with Colonel Hicks (let’s hope that the name wasn’t ripped off of Aliens and Corporal Hicks) giving all of his orders to a sergeant of all people?!?  The colonel should have been giving his orders to other mid-ranking officers (such as captains and majors), and those officers would give the commands to the NCOs who would give the commands to everybody lower than them on the battlefield.  That’s how the chain of command works.  A sergeant receiving orders from a colonel is not going to be telling everybody on the battlefield (and in the sky in the case of the F-18s) what to do.

The sequence with the three Apache helicopters chasing Godzilla through the city was hilariously bad and not even close to what would have happened in reality.  Not even close to reality!  Those choppers would have instead stayed ABOVE the buildings and easily fired their machine guns down onto the monster.  They also would NOT use Sidewinder missiles (and air-to-air missile that takes out other aircraft) against a cold-blooded reptile.  Sidewinders need a significant heat source to track their targets, like the exhaust from an aircraft’s engine.  There’s no way in hell that a cold-blooded reptile could have given off anywhere near the amount of heat that would register in the missile’s tracking system.

Also, those Sidewinder missiles should have never come close to destroying the Chrysler Building.  Those missiles are designed to primarily destroy aircraft engines, not structurally sound buildings built with steel and concrete.

Remember when that last Apache pilot was trying to evade Godzilla?  When unarmed, the Apache can fly at over 20,000 feet in the air.  Why in the hell didn’t that pilot simply climb into the air and fly away from the monster instead of staying low and in its biting / attack range?

That’s a bad, bad Hollywood!  No treat for you!  Roland Emmerich wasn’t even trying to get anything with the military remotely close to being accurate.

The same goes true later in the film during that sequence with the submarines attacking Godzilla while he’s underwater.  It’s crap, crap and more crap.  It’s obvious that the film’s creators had no intention of getting anything remotely correct.

How about those F-18 Hornets during the final two attack scenes?  Was it a coincidence that the F-18 Hornet was made famous and used heavily in the film Independence Day, a blockbuster movie that was released in 1996, just two years before Godzilla?  Can’t these people create any *original* ideas?

I think my favorite part of the F-18 scene was when the pilot uses a “laser track” on the target, talks about selecting an LGB (a laser-guided bomb) as the weapon of choice, actually selects the AGM-84A Harpoon missile (an anti-ship missile designed to be fired from over a hundred miles away from the target, uses active radar to track and home in on the enemy ship), and then refers to the “LGB” as a “Maverick.”  The AGM-65 Maverick is an air-to-surface missile designed for close air support and to destroy enemy vehicles such as tanks and artillery, certainly not buildings as large as Madison Square Garden.  Oddly enough, when the “Maverick” is fired from the aircraft in this movie, it looks just like the Harpoon missile.

Once again, this film is just spewing out complete crap that’s not even close to anything resembling a realistic military strike.  I’m well aware that this is a fantasy film, but the producers could have at least tried a little bit to get something right.

So what do we have in the end?

Here we have a Godzilla film that features a creature that looks and acts NOTHING like the Godzilla monsters in previous films.  This thing is a giant mess.  Let’s also not forget that the part of the film dealing with the hatchling lizards is a complete rip-off of the Velociraptors in the Jurassic Park films.

We also have a film that heavily involves the military, yet virtually every single scene with military personnel, equipment, and the battle scenes are WAY OFF from reality.  It’s not even close.  Not by a long shot.  In fact, the military scenes are so bad and the actors are so corny that this is a complete embarrassment to the real United States Army.

This film also has Kevin Dunn in a role inappropriate for him, Matthew Brodderick as a nerdy action star, Jean Reno playing a stereotypical French guy, and a bunch of nobodies supporting them.  Reno was clearly the best actor in the bunch.  It’s a shame that a film as big as this one failed so badly in casting the right people for the roles.

New York City Mayor Ebert?!?  Really?  A character who has the same last name and just so happens to look like a famous real life movie critic?  Is that supposed to be a joke, or is it another example of just how unoriginal these people really are?

A character named Sergeant O’Neal?  Really?  Was it just a coincidence that basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal was in his prime with the Los Angeles Lakers at that time?  If you mentioned the name O’Neal back then, most people thought you were talking about the basketball player.

What’s really insulting is that back in 1998, this film was being promoted as the BIG American version of Godzilla.  It was a big-budget film that was supposed to wow and dazzle everybody, and also show Japan that Hollywood could make a great Godzilla film.

Unfortunately, the opposite happened.  Although this film earned a profit, it’s a complete failure when it comes to the characters, the plot, the monster, and everything else, especially the military scenes.  This is a film that had a huge potential but created a terrible experience in the end.

Godzilla (1998) – movie trailer

1998’s Godzilla is best enjoyed followed by a session of heavy drinking.  You’ll quickly pass out from the alcohol and sleep peacefully, sparring yourself the agony and sheer disappointment of sitting through this worthless film.

Philippe Roaché – [slurps drink, groans] “You call this coffee?”
Jean-Luc – “I call this America.”

——————–

Sergeant O’Neal – “I can’t believe it, uh… he did all of this and… we did nothing to him.”
Dr. Niko Tatopoulus – “Ah, that’s not true. We fed him.”

——————–

Audrey Timmonds – “Wait, I don’t get it… If he’s the first of his kind, how can he be pregnant? Doesn’t he need a mate?”
Dr. Niko Tatopoulus – “Not if he reproduces asexually.”
Audrey Timmonds – “Where’s the fun in that?”

——————–

Dr. Niko Tatopoulus – “What’s with the chewing gum?”
Philippe Roaché – “It makes us look more American.”