Quick, how many Godzilla movies are there? 28. 29 if you count this film. To date, this is the only North American attempt in film towards Godzilla. The only one. Apparently it is so reviled, they didn't go for a round two. Deceptisean has already written pretty eloquently about this subject so I'm not going to dwell on it too much. All I'm going to do is give my perspective.
Now, when I saw the original Godzilla in theatres in 1998, did I hate the film? No. However, before you think you know how this is all going to shake down, let me add something to that fact: I had not seen a single Godzilla film or television show or anything before Godzilla. Of course I knew who Godzilla is. Godzilla is all over pop culture, he's in video games, books, board games, lunch boxes, he was in a Hanna Barbera cartoon, I mean, it's all there man, whenever you see people running in Japan and screaming, you automatically think an enormous lizard is chasing them. However, that's all I knew. So, seeing the movie, I did not immediately understand how deficient this film is.
I now own the original Godzilla, the 1954 one, not dubbed, proper subtitles. J-Man and Decepitisean have shown me a few Godzilla movies. I get it now. I get it. I understand why this movie sucks. It's just not good, it's a terrible representation both of the character and of the world of the character. The scene in Madison Square Garden with the babies? Horrendous. Terrible. There's a reason they haven't made another one -- because this movie sucked so much, they were afraid to do another one. To get it this wrong this badly is inexcusable.
So, even though I originally did not hate this film, I get the hate now. Hey, Total Film can't always be wrong. This one is easy to hate and easy to understand why people roll their eyes and spew all sorts of profane comments when this movie is mentioned. Looking back now, almost 15 years later, this movie just was a terrible, terrible representation of the source material, just a totally vapid and poorly executed film that did no justice whatsoever to the original.
Rating: Worth the hate? Absolutely.
- Stephenstein
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