3.6.11 Secondhand cinema—Godzilla and the films of Ronald Emmerich

Along with this year’s The Day After Tomorrow, and his 1996 aliens attack movie Independence Day, Godzilla (1998) is one of three high-budget summer popcorn-munchers both written and directed in the last decade by German-born director Roland Emmerich.

As with the other two films, there is little in Godzilla that could be traced directly to Emmerich’s mind. Nearly everything is lifted in one form or another from pop-culture, from speculative pop-science, from the prosaic storytelling techniques taught in film schools.

Each of the three films is based on one far-out premise, but instead of apologizing for it, simply takes it as given and and proceeds as if it were all happening in an otherwise normal universe. Everything that follows is made as plausible as possible, much like many other scientific thrillers, such as Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. As in the 1954 Toho Studios original, Godzilla is born of mutations caused by radioactive fallout. Of course, the premise is scientifically and culturally outdated cold war nonsense. Similarly, Independence Day is based on the aliens attacking the Earth premise, and The Day After Tomorrow is based on that old, ice-ages-can-arrive-in-two-weeks premise. None of these are plausible but in this kind of story, we can forgive that by itself up front. But where Emmerich diverges from such authors as Crichton is in his inability or unwillingness to return to plausibility regarding what follows, constantly basing plot points on poor understanding of what comes off like superficial readings of fashionable pop science.

Among many other notables: In Independence Day the world is saved by a computer virus of undisclosed nature that works on alien computers. In Godzilla the monster, a giant mutant iguana is conveniently and inexplicably able to reproduce asexually, allowing Emmerich to sidestep the sticky issue of how he becomes pregnant. And worst of the bunch, The Day After Tomorrow comes off like a script someone wrote immediately after reading a Readers Digest book on the Ice Age. "Mammoths were found with food still in their stomachs." (Wow! It must have happened overnight!) Dire Wolves roamed the plains (Dude!—there should be some wolves in it, even though it’s set in New York).

The characters are all undigested cliches. We have the "mild-mannered scientist" who studies earthworms (Matthew Broderick), his ultra-cutesy "perky blond girl" reporter looking for the big story (Maria Pitillo), her "fiery redhead" potential romantic competition who studies dinosaurs (Vicki Lewis), the "geeky fat guy" scientist whom the women don’t like (Malcom Danare), the "dumb soldier with a heart of gold" (Doug Savant), the "mysterious secret agent" (Jean Reno), the "fat greasy politician" (Michael Lerner), et cetera.

On the whole, the acting is better than can be expected given the script—which is to say that it is poor but not intolerably so. They do what they can with their lines. If Pitillo’s portrayal of a child-woman who is too innocent to survive in the jungle of Big City news reporting, is strained and affected, it is because she wasn’t given the means through a script containing anything more than one-liners, pop-culture pablum and the latest pseudo- and popular science. Broderick tried to bring some subtlety to the role of the soft-spoken scientist, but when you bring subtlety to a content-less part the result is not subtle, but simply unclear. The best performance is Jean Reno’s enigmatic French secret agent. But even Reno’s normally strong on-screen presence is subdued here, for lack of much interesting to do or say. (His defining characteristic seems to be a disdain for American coffee).

If the film suffers from major problems of consistency and plausibility, the real culprit is its writer, Emmerich himself. Emmerich, who lists ’70s schlock disaster movies The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno among his favorite movies (1), could make excellent light entertainment films if he would only hire a ghost-writer to create his scripts, and maybe a real scientist to check them for plausibility.

But in fairness, the production values are generally high. Godzilla stomps spectacularly on landmarks of the New York city skyline, outsmarting military tacticians. The digital effects (with a few noticeable exceptions) still stand up six years later. The film is a spectacular festival of explosions, toppling buildings, car/monster chases—oh yes, and a 400-foot iguana. The film is visually impressive, reasonably well paced and David Arnold’s score is effectively non-intrusive wall-paper. The film is decent light entertainment worth seeing once for that purpose, especially with the younger set.

Seattle, Washington
2002

(1) www.horrorview.com/Godzilla%20shame.htm