Movie review: Godzilla

Originally published June 12, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1282

In considering Godzilla, I’ve decided that–rather than depend upon my own opinions–I’m going to fall back on the experts. See what they have to say.

First: professional movie reviewer Mark McEwen.

In a full-page ad for Godzilla, McEwen of CBS This Morning is quoted. It’s an opinion that the marketing folks were so proud of that it leads off the ad without sense of irony. McEwen’s pull-quoted description of the movie was:

“The A-Ticket Ride of the Summer!”

Now…

Let’s think about this.

Once upon a time, decades ago I believe, when you went to Disneyland and/or Disneyworld, the park was studded with little booths from which you could purchase ride tickets. These tickets ranged, in lettering, from A to E. You could purchase them singly or as books.

E tickets were the most expensive, the top-drawer rides such as “Space Mountain.” To this day, the term “That’s an E-ticket attraction” refers to something that is top-of-the-line, even though letter tickets have long since been replaced by all-inclusive passes.

Now A-tickets, on the other hand… they were the ones that most people had in the largest quantity. There were the most of them in a book because they were the cheapest, the least interesting rides. The stuff that no adult had any real hankering to see.

(Granted, it’s possible to make even the most feeble ride seem interesting. Paul Dini and I once went on “Snow White’s Scary Adventure” when there was no one else around, and amused ourselves by screaming in blood-curdling terror at everything we encountered, no matter what it was. Little singing birds, the Dwarfs, everything elicited deafening howls of fear. We got very strange looks from the attendants upon emerging. But I digress…)

In short, A-ticket rides were for the most part the kiddie rides, the stuff that parents took the little ones on while the teenagers went on the cooler stuff.

McEwen may not have meant it as such, but he pretty much nailed it. It’s a film that adults can bring their children to, content in the knowledge that the kids will find it interesting and there’s some modicum of visual stimulation to engage the adult’s interest. However, much like the Disneyland Carousel, it goes around and around with no particular purpose to it.

Whom to talk to next?

Well, I spoke to my kids. Ariel, age 6, and Gwen, age 13, accompanied me to the showing.

Before the film started, Ariel asked me her usual question: “Is this a true story?” It’s the reason (well, one of many reasons) that I haven’t let her see Titanic despite her pleadings (her sisters saw it, and that’s usually enough incentive.) Ariel’s a pretty movie-savvy kid, more interested in the technical aspects of film production than anything else, although she is able to zero in on story holes fairly quickly. Titanic is about real events, real deaths and a real tragedy. Having a child see a film in which children die is problematic enough; when it’s based on a true story, it’s too much. But Godzilla, well, I didn’t anticipate any real difficulties.

Ariel wanted to see the film just by hearing about it second hand. When I asked her what she thought it was going to be about, she said, “A big gorilla.” I explained, no, that was King Kong. This was about a giant dinosaur. “Oh, like Reptar,” she said, referring to the dinosaur character worshipped by Nickelodeon’s Rugrats; a character who is, visually, based on Godzilla. “Yeah, just like,” I said, without bothering to explain which came first.

About three quarters of the way through Godzilla, Ariel dozed off. This was, as they say, not a good sign. She came to about fifteen minutes later, apparently none the worse for wear and oblivious to the fact that she had missed any of what was nominally the plot. She jumped several times, covering not her eyes but her ears since she found Godzilla’s roar to be nothing short of deafening.

Gwen sat and watched with polite interest. Later I spoke to them to find out what they thought of the entertainment.

“It was scary,” opined Ariel. Scarier than Jurassic Park? “Yes. But not scarier than Jurassic Park II,” she quickly added. She found a sequence involving scads of several hundred hungry baby Godzillas to be far more daunting to her than anything focusing on Godzilla himself.

Gwen was more acerbic. “No one died,” she said. When I pointed out that a brace of soldiers and assorted Japanese sailors bit the big one, she amended, “No one interesting died.”

“Was there, in fact, anyone interesting?” I asked. “Did you care whether any of the characters lived or died?”

“Not especially, no.”

“So you weren’t worried about them.”

She shrugged. “A bunch of people being chased by computer thingies. Who cares?”

That might be the most incisive comment since “The A-ticket ride of the summer.”

However, while seeing the film with my daughters, I noticed someone in the back of the theater, sitting quietly and watching without comment. I couldn’t believe my luck. Who would have thought that, in a theater in Long Island, one of the foremost experts on Godzilla was viewing the film while huddling unnoticed in the rear of the theater. Before the lights came up, I hurried to the back and sat down in the seat next to him. He glanced at me suspiciously but didn’t say anything.

“Forgive me for bothering you,” I whispered, “but… aren’t you Godzooky?”

He didn’t answer at first, just pulled his trenchcoat more tightly around himself. But when he realized I wasn’t going away, he nodded.

The years had not been kind to Godzooky. He had aged, but he hadn’t grown, kind of like a reptilian Gary Coleman. His skin was darker green, and there seemed to be resentment burning in his eyes. “Can I talk to you about your feelings on the movie?”

He hesitated a moment, then nodded again. After bringing the girls home, I circled back and we rendezvoused at a sushi place.

I had thought it might be difficult to get Godzooky to open up. I could not have been more wrong. Two beers and I couldn’t shut him up.

Godzooky had not been getting much work since his heyday in the Godzilla animated series. He’d done a few gigs here and there, it turned out, and was in a few crowd scenes in Jurassic Park. Mostly, he seemed bitter.

“Barney was supposed to be my show,” he complained. “I did early development work on that. It was my idea, except it was a vehicle for me. Then, at the last minute, we couldn’t come to terms on residuals. My agent recommended I walk as a negotiating ploy. I walked, they cast some guy in a costume, rest is history. That was the end of my agent, of course.”

“You fired him?” I asked.

He looked at me with dark, pitiless eyes. “Oookay,” he said simply.

Quickly, we moved on to the main topic at hand. “I knew Godzilla,” Godzooky said, slurring his words slightly. “I worked with Godzilla. That,” and he raised a winged arm, his voice getting louder, “was not Godzilla.” Despite his volume, no one seemed to pay him much attention. Apparently they knew him there. “That was their big mistake, you know. When they were promoting Independence Day, they showed all the main visuals. With Godzilla, they kept everything secret. So audiences who knew what Godzilla looked like–and that’s pretty much everybody–had no time to adjust. They looked at that… CGI thing… and immediately said, That’s not right.'”

“What did you think of the story?”

“Typical plot holes you could drive a 200 foot dino through. Like when the heat-seeking missiles couldn’t lock onto Godzilla because he was too cold. Too cold? Five minutes earlier, he was breathing fire, for cryin’ out loud. How cold could he be?”

“Well, it’s possible that it was a chemical fire, caused by Godzilla’s breath interacting with another gas causing the…”

He didn’t appear to have heard me. “And they’ve got Godzilla dodging missiles. Why would he dodge them? He’d never seen them before. Why wouldn’t he swat at them, or try to eat them? See, that’s the original Godzilla, my Godzilla. He could take whatever was thrown at him. This one has to get out of everything’s way. And what was the deal with the size? He’s supposed to be gigantic, people are like insects next to his feet…and then he hides in a subway tunnel? I mean, c’mon! He wanted an island to nest on? What’s wrong with Australia?”

“Well, that’s a continent…”

“Who cares?! It’s a dámņëd sight bigger than Manhattan! And if you’re going to have it in New York City, at least get your geography right! Since when is the Brooklyn Bridge the closest suspension bridge to the Park Avenue underpass? The Queensboro’s only 20 blocks away! They couldn’t crack a map? And the mayor and his aide looking and talking like Siskel and Ebert… what the hëll was up with that?”

“Probably it was Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich taking a pot shot at–”

“You know the big difference between this thing and Independence Day? In ID4, there was nothing interesting or original going on, but there was so much uninteresting and unoriginal stuff going on that it distracted you from it. And all the plot and visual elements that they ripped off were from old films that the average teenager didn’t have any recent memory of, like War of the Worlds and even Star Wars. But all that stuff in Godzilla smacked of Jurassic Park, so there wasn’t anything new and novel visually to grab you. And while ID4 was a tangle of plot lines and various cardboard characters, this only had a handful of cardboard characters. It was a smaller story. The problem is when something is smaller it makes you look closer, and once you look closely at Godzilla, you realize that there’s nothin’ there. So I guess size really does matter… or at least quantity,” and he snorted.

He was silent for a moment.

Then he looked up at me and I saw there were cold tears of anger trickling down his face. “I met with them.”

“Who?”

“Emmerich and Devlin. I took a meeting with them, a year or so ago. It was humiliating. They laughed at me… and then they swiped my suggestions! I was the one who suggested that they work the Gojira/Godzilla mistranslation thing in. Do you know what their original script had a newscaster say? “God, that’s a big ’zilla!” That’s where his name came from!

“And the whole thing with the baby Godzillas? My idea! I even heard people in the audience today, when the babies show up, saying, ‘Look! Godzooky!’ It tore my heart out. Okay, I admit it, I came up with the idea as a way of getting myself in the film. Can you blame me? I could be doing Shakespeare in the park, but I’m typecast as a small winged dinosaur! No one believes I have any range! This was going to be my big comeback film!

“And not only did they give me the bum’s rush and steal my concept without so much as a lousy screen credit, but then they taunt me by sticking a Barney’ cameo in the background, because they know how sensitive I am about it!” He leaned over and shouted into my tape recorder, “Roland! Dean! Your pasty-white butts are mine, buddy boys! Mine!”

And then, in a burst of rage, Godzooky tore out of the restaurant, went down to a local mall, and stampeded through a model Lego City, as Japanese tourists pointed and laughed.

It was pretty sad. Definitely an A-ticket attraction.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)