The film godzilla starred:
-Matthew Broderick as Dr. Niko Tatopoulos
-Mario Pitillo as Audrey Timmonds
-Hank Azaria as Victor ’Animal’ Palotti
-Jean Reno as Phillipe Roche
-Kevin Dunn as Colonel Hicks
-Micheal Lerner as Mayor Ebbert
and was Directed by Roland Emmerich
The Plot:
Back in the 1980’s French nuclear testing in the pacific has mutated one lizard into a 1000ft monster. The first to experience this new creature is a Japanese ship in a storm, they are attacked and all but one of the crew are killed.
Now we switch to Russia, Dr. Niko is a small time scientist working on the effect of radiation at the Chernobyl site on common earth worms. A helicopter arrives with American officials, who whisk him off to Panama. Here he is shown a giant footprint amongst a lot of devastation. He is surprised as anyone would be, what could make a print that size? He then becomes part of an army unit trying to find out what is going on. We also learn around this point that there are some kind of French officials doing the same kind of job. The two teams meet up and the wreck of the Japanese ship which has been washed ashore. The ships side has what looks like giant claw marks.
Then three fishing trawlers are destroyed just 300 miles away from the American coast. The army unit start to worry as they don’t even know what it is yet. Then it finally happens. Godzilla makes its appearance on land by trashing its way through a dockyard. So it begins. How will they stop the creature? Who are the mysterious French team?
Quite frankly who cares? This was supposed to be the big summer movie. But there’s just one small problem. It’s dumb and crap. If you had been following the hype, you’d have no doubt seen Godzilla’s foot crush a car. Now imagine this scene used over and over and over again. After the first shot of the foot crushing a car, I’d had enough. Its so over used, its tiresome. If fact you see its legs and feet more than the main body because it is so big. I saw enough of that in the trailers, I want to see more body.
Godzilla itself is poor. Not a lot of imagination went into the creature. Its a Jurassic Park T-Rex with a square head. That’s it. To make things worse, it lays two hundred eggs and baby Godzilla’s appear later in the movie. And guess what, they look just like Jurassic Park velociraptors with square heads. Even the action is taken from the Jurassic Park films as the gang try to escape the baby Godzilla’s.
The humans in the film are just as bad. I haven’t seen Matthew Broderick in a film for ages apart from inspector gadget. Perhaps now I know why. He is a likeable guy but there was some truly poor acting at some points. The rest of the cast weren’t much better. Jean Reno probably came out best, but he was terribly underused, it was a shame.
The special effects are the only thing that kept me watching this film, and then they weren’t very spectacular. They were a bit dodgy compared to today’s standard. The baby Godzilla’s were very dodgy in some places indeed. It seems that the team of Devlin and Emmerich is becoming very poor. Their films are going downhill and this is a shame because they started well. I don’t what their working on now, but I hope its better than this.
Should you see it? Only see it if your prepared to rip it to shreds and make fun of it. Its not that entertaining as anything between Godzilla attacks is boring. I think this is destined for the late night video with the lads and a few beers slot. I think plot matters more than size.