Godzilla - 1998

It wasn’t bad you know, I liked it. Sure, it wasn’t anything intellectual, smart, high-class, and the monster didn’t look like the original Godzilla at all…the main problem is that it shouldn’t have been called Godzilla,  because it’s not a remake of the original, it’s a complete different story (almost complete: they are both mutated by nuclear radiations); the monster is called Godzilla because it attacked a Japanese ship, and when asked what happened the only survivor only repeated the same word ‘go-zi-ra’ or something like that, basically Godzilla with a lovely Japanese sound (I love Japanese sounds, I wish I knew the language).

Personally, I found it fun enough. Entertainment, with a lot of monsters-screentime. Good. Nothing like that boring thing in 2014. Here, you see the monsters almost more than the people, and that’s good :-) Plus, it was its intention to be light entertainment, more fun than accurate, they clear this point from the beginning, when nobody can say Nick’s name Tatopoulos, so from that first smile you know how to deal with this movie. Just enjoy the fun and the entertainment. 

And there was entertainment. 

The story here: after French’s nuclear tests, a lizard mutates into something huge. It attacks a Japanese ship and moves towards America. Well, swims, that is. 

Nick is a scientist, studying the worms have grown because of nuclear radiation in the soil in Chernobyl. He is approached by military man and called to help them with this new crisis. Personally I liked Matthew Broderick’s air of a normal guy. I thought it was funny when he stood right in the middle of a huge footprint but kept saying “where is it?” because of course he didn’t notice it at first, how could he?

I also thought it was funny how Sergeant O’Neill (Doug Savant, even though I keep calling him Matt and can never remember his real name) looked rather goofy and embarrassed when he had to say that they ‘lost it’ :-p not the usual kind of soldier you get in disaster movies, either stoic or dumb..

Of course there’s a little romance in the character of Audrey (Maria Pitillo), a good girl who dreams to become a journalist, but her boss dismisses any hopes of a promotion when she refuses to “go to dinner with him”… 

Her friend Victor (Hank Azaria) teases her saying she’s too quiet and good to stand up to guys like him and have a career, so when she sees Nick on tv she thinks she might have inside information.. still her boss won’t care to listen to her, so she goes to see Nick on her own. He’s glad to see her; they broke up eight years ago but he still has her pictures around. He shows her everything, and she steals the tape with the Japanese man in the hospital. Her boss steals her story making it look like his own scoop and naming the creature Godzilla. When they see the tape on tv, Nick is fired for leaking information. 

There’s Jean Reno playing Philippe, a French secret service agent. He offers Nick to work with them, because they want to take care of the whole disaster since it was their Country who started it, in a way. Nick has informed everyone that Godzilla was pregnant and has probably a dozen eggs somewhere behind Manhattan, and that they need to find and destroy the nest or in no time there could be an invasion of Godzillas, but the military don’t believe him; Philippe does, so while the US military tries to kill Godzilla, they look for its nest. 

Victor and Audrey follow them hoping to make the scoop of their lives. 

It seems like the military finally succeeded and killed Godzilla (yeah right), but Nick and the French guys find a bigger nest than they were expecting. Not just a dozen eggs, but lots lots more.

They don’t have enough explosives, but to make things even more difficult, the eggs hatch while they are there, and they have to run. The little Godzillas look very much like raptors with webbed feet, they even move the same way, it’s like watching Jurassic park! 

They all try to escape, and everyone (important) makes it; the French soldiers don’t. Audrey manages to go live with the breaking news of the big nest in the Madison Square Gardens in an attempt to warn the military outside that they need to bomb the Madison to kill all the little ones, since phone lines are too crowded. 

They get out just in time before the explosion, but then surprise surprise, big Godzilla was not dead, is here now, and rather pissed that they killed all its babies. It’s even touching when it looks at all its dead ‘children’… poor things. 

Godzilla chases them around the city while they escape with a taxi driven by Philippe. They have it trapped on the Brooklyn bridge so that it can be bombed again, and this time making sure that they succeed. 

I liked the way Nick looked at the dying Godzilla, sorry for the death of such a unique creature, but it was inevitable of course. 

Happy ending, the city has been saved (half destroyed, maybe not so much by Godzilla but by the soldiers and planes always missing their target…), Audrey and Nick are back together and she quits her old job with the pig, Philippe has disappeared and Victor can’t find his tape… but then Philippe calls Nick on the phone to say goodbye and he tells him he’ll return the tape after having deleted a few details, like his involvement I guess of course. 

I didn’t like the scene when Godzilla catches the taxi in his big mouth but they manage to drive out… 

All in all it was entertaining :-) that’s all these movies should be, after all if you start counting the things that are wrong with all the Jurassic Park movies, you’ll go on a long time. At least in this movie the girl didn’t scream from star to finish and didn’t act all superior while being actually as thick as a brick. The leading male was simple and nice, not the usual macho. He was a scientist and he stayed that way, didn’t become the usual Rambo you get in this kind of movies. 

I’m glad I watched it, I might even watch it again :-)