With Godzilla was the first major Hollywood depiction of the monster and the result is so bad it’s good.
There are a lot of cancelled Godzilla movies that could have been awesome, but instead, TriStar pictures went ahead with a disaster movie where Godzilla could have easily been replaced by a hurricane or a tsunami and it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference. However, though the typical Roland Emmerich movie is as messy as the streets of the New York it depicts, there are still a lot of things the 90s movie got right.
Got Right: Godzilla Is Smart
As Godzilla has a rich history and was made as a metaphor for nuclear weapons in the wake of Hiroshima, it’s a little arbitrary for the studio to take Americanize the creature and shed it of its culture, but it could have been a lot worse.
Godzilla is actually written as if it has a few brain cells. When the military tries to lure Godzilla into a park to trap it, Godzilla sees right through the military’s motivations and backtracks, and it’s one of the many times that she proves she’s a smart creature.
Unforgivable Error: Ripping Off The Usual Suspects
At the very beginning of the movie, after Godzilla has attacked a huge carrier ship on the ocean, Jean Reno runs into a hospital to quiz one of the few survivors. The survivor, almost completely wrapped in bandages, can only say one thing, “Godzilla.”
The scene is almost frame for frame the same as when Giancarlo Esposito bursts into the room of the one surviving worker in The Usual Suspects after the massacre on the boat.
Got Right: Keeping The Monster Hidden
As Godzilla only has 11 minutes of screen time, which is one of the interesting facts about the movie, the film does everything it possibly can to tease the audience with little glimpses of a tail or a claw without showing the beast in full.
Though it may have something to do with the fact that the producers knew full well how bad the CGI creature looked, it’s one of the smartest things the movie does and one of the few ways it builds a modicum of tension.
Unforgivable Error: No Villains
Godzilla has loads of villains, but in the 1998 movie, the villain seems to be the military. With a history of so many rich and abstract villains, including telepathic twin girls, a three-headed beast, and a giant moth, not to mention the giant gorilla himself, the idea of Godzilla standing off against the military is so run of the mill and it turns the movie into another humdrum disaster movie. And what’s worse is, in the end, the military wins.
Got Right: Practical Effects
It’s no secret that the CGI in Godzilla is embarrassingly bad, but everything surrounding the computer-generated creature looks fantastic.
Whether it’s the James Cameron-esque sequences in the water or the outdoor New York scenes on the road, it all looks fantastic, and it’s one of the reasons why Roland Emmerich is the go-to director for big blockbuster disaster movies.
Unforgivable Error: Cliched Characters
The 2014 remake of Godzilla was praised for its technical effects, but it was criticized for its mundane human characters. Similarly, the boring human characters in Godzilla: King of the Monsters is one of the things the movie got wrong.
However, the 1998 version of the movie is almost worse, as it plays into every possible stereotype, whether it’s a boss trying to take advantage of a female employee by dangling a promotion in front of her or the cliched combative relationships between the scientists and the military.
Got Right: Jean Reno
Jean Reno might be the single greatest thing about Godzilla, and he might be the only character that isn’t a cliched trope of an action movie.
He is the most down to earth character, but his mission also makes sense and he’s the vessel for most of the movie’s few jokes that land, the best of which being the fact that he and his French crew all chew gum because it makes them look more American.
Unforgivable Error: Casting Matthew Broderick
There’s a lot of terrible casting in the movie, but the worst of all might be making Matthew Broderick the lead of the movie. The actor takes the role to strange places, as he literally seems like an older version of Ferris Bueller, which is what Broderick is most well known for.
The actor is responsible for many of the unintentionally funny scenes in the movie and once viewers picture Bueller, it’s hard to take the movie seriously.
Got Right: The Final Scene
One of the best scenes in the movie comes about two-thirds of the way through as Reno and Broderick enter Madison Square Garden to find dozens of eggs laid by Godzilla. Even better is when they enter on to the actual stadium grounds and they find hundreds of eggs.
Well, after they have all been eradicated and Godzilla has died, the movie cuts to one egg left standing, which cracks open and a baby-Zilla jumps out at the audience. It’s the most exciting moment in the movie, but it comes a little too late.
Unforgivable Error: The CGI
The way Godzilla looks in the 1998 movie is borderline unforgivable, as he looks like some kind of mutated Tyrannosaurus Rex with a giant forehead.
Not only that, but the lighting on the CGI creature doesn’t fit with the natural outdoor light of New York, making it look like Godzilla has literally been pasted into some random establishing shots of New York. The CGI is so bad that it didn’t even look good 22 years ago.
