REVIEW ALL MONSTERS! - GINO-COLOGY

The foremost of all the non-pressing questions I have regarding the 1998 American Godzilla - pro tip: there is no such thing as a pressing question about the 1998 Godzilla - is whether or not it's the worst film of the Godzilla franchise. And I suppose I should really first ask the question if it's part of the Godzilla franchise at all, since that seems to generally be something that fans try to downplay. But, in 1998, Toho certainly regarded it that way: they used 1995's Godzilla vs. Destoroyah to put their own monster in the ground to clear the way for a planned Tri-Star trilogy of movies, and they had an official copyright on the new monster design, created by Patrick Tatopolous, calling it Godzilla. That's good enough for me, even if a few years later, Toho legally had the copyright changed, renaming the creature Zilla and banishing it and its film from the mainline of the series. But that was all ass-covering after the film came out and sucked, and failed to make enough money to cover its production budget and staggeringly comprehensive ad campaign (which I can still remember with crystal clarity 16 years later: "His ___ is bigger than this ___" posters plastered against every flat surface that would stand still for long enough, and a tie-in with that long-gone Taco Bell chihuahua, the idiotic details of which I will recall after senescence has taken from me the faces of loved ones), though it did end up eking out a profit, despite its reputation as a flop. At any case, in 1998, this wasn't some misbegotten Godzilla spin-off, it was a proper Godzilla movie, and I will not assist in a corporate attempt to plunge those days deep into the memory hole.

Back to the question, then: is Godzilla '98 the worst film of the Godzilla franchise? It is, beyond any sane shadow of a doubt, the worst Godzilla film - so divorced from any remote connection to the 44-year, 22- film history of the character as it existed at that point that it's frankly incomprehensible why the studio even bothered to acquire the naming rights when they could have saved a quick $10 million by just calling it, I don't know, Iguanos, Lizard-Bitch of the Pacific. And prior to Toho's re-christening of the central monster, fans had long since taken to calling it G.I.N.O., Godzilla In Name Only. This is reasonable and correct. But "the worst Godzilla film" and "the worst film involving a thing called Godzilla" are not the same thing. And the films that involve a thing called Godzilla include the likes of All Monsters Attack/Godzilla's Revenge and Godzilla vs. Megalon, so it's not nearly as straightforward as case as Godzilla fandom likes to pretend.

But let's not miss the forest for the trees: Godzilla '98 is fucking wretched. It's easily the worst movie in the career of director Roland Emmerich, not exactly a man who has swung from peak to peak; Godzilla came right in between the clamorous Independence Day and the rancid The Patriot, and made both of them look at least decent in comparison. Of all the scripts that Emmerich and writing/producing partner Dean Devlin cranked out in the 1990s (their partnership ended after The Patriot, owing in part to just how badly Godzilla stumbled out of the gate), this is probably the worst, shamelessly aping the formula that put Independence Day over so well with audiences in '96, and hiding the creators' public contempt for monster movies not whatsoever. And yet the writing is hardly the worst thing in Godzilla, a movie that is even worse at dumb CGI spectacle than it as telling a coherent story with plausible characters. It's kind of exciting, really, just how low Emmerich and Devlin were able to go.

That all being said, the opening 25 or 30 minutes of the film suggest a mindless popcorn movie at least on the level of Independence Day. It's straightforward enough to start with: grainy video footage tinted yellow of lizards mucking about in French Polynesia as nukes explode and a tinny version of "La Marseillaise" plays. So, French nuclear testing mutates some kind of marine reptile. Got it? Good. And then the plot begins as so many real daikaiju eiga have begun, with a fishing vessel being destroyed at sea by something very large. Hell, for the first five minutes, it doesn't even seem like a passable piece of junk food; it even feels like a movie.

Which stops pretty much the exact second that we cut to Matthew Broderick singing along with "Singin' in the Rain" in the most alarming douchey way possible. Broderick, our oddly-cast hero, plays Niko Tatopolous (named for the monster's designer, y'see), a biologist studying the effect of radiation on Chernobyl earthworms. He's busy electrocuting them and digging them out of the ground, in that order, when the U.S. government comes along to spirit him off to Tahiti; seems that a very large animal has been spotted, and its gigantic tracks are lousy with radiation. By the time the research time pieces all of that together, it's already moved onto Panama, and by the 20-minute mark, the creature is lumbering around in water outside Manhattan, where it makes a suitably half-seen first appearance as a giant humped back in the water and massive legs storming down the street. Any question of "what" is now officially dumped in favor of "how the hell do we stop it?", with Niko ending up in New York and thus being spotted on TV by his ex-girlfriend Audrey Timmonds (Maria Pitillo), now working at channel WIDF as a wannabe reporter and personal assistant to the loathsome news anchor Charles Caiman (Harry Shearer).

It's right about at this point that the film invisibly shifts from being a modestly (very modestly) effective mystery about the exact details of what Godzilla is in this film - Emmerich and Devlin have the basic decency not to pretend that we aren't all well aware of what's going on in broad terms - and starts to become an unpleasant slog through the worst that effects-driven American cinema of the 1990s has to offer. It's right about now, after all, that the basic shape of the plot starts to reveal itself, and it becomes clear that this wants to be a '70s-style disaster film more than a monster movie, and will largely dedicate itself to this task with lugubrious intensity, starting with the fact that we now have our Broken-Up Couple to be Reforged in the Fires of Adversity. It's also at this point that we become aware of just how much time we're going to spend in the company of some truly awful performances and characters: for Pitillo, this was meant to be the big breakout moment in a career that had been quietly simmering for some years, but it only serves to showcase how profoundly limited an actor she was. Not that the version of Audrey presented in the script was going to be redeemed by any performer who might possibly be interested in taking the role: she's an obnoxious cipher with one whole personality trait and her big contribution to the plot consists of making the worst possible decision at a moment when it's obvious what a terrible decision it is. But Pitillo exacerbates the character, with a petulant, bratty series of expressions and line deliveries that make the character seem like the biggest pill imaginable. And let us not pick on the one person whose career puked out because of the movie: if her Audrey is a simpering nothing, then she is but the ideal romantic lead for Broderick's ghastly, lukewarm Niko, and there's a lot more of him in the movie than there is of her.

The human drama is boundlessly insipid, worse than in any of the Japanese Godzilla pictures, but even that isn't a patch on the comedy that has saturated every moment of the film. I have no patience for the arch-serious, visually dark and ultra-urban style of so many contemporary popcorn movies, but it's instructive to go back in time to see what that aesthetic is in response to: because God almighty, but the 1990s had some awful comic relief going on. Quips, jokey asides, irreverence where it's entirely unwelcome; and Godzilla has some of the worst. It's not merely that there are jokes that aren't funny and shouldn't be there; it's that the film acts like things are jokes which don't even have the apparent construction of jokes. Example: Niko Tatopolous's name is mispronounced by the anti-Godzilla military leader, Colonel Hicks (Kevin Dunn, the only human being in the movie doing anything that feels like halfway decent acting), so the scientist corrects him. "Whatever", says Hicks. Is this funny? Is there anything about this that qualifies as a joke? The way it's staged sure as hell seems to think it is. Or the infamous "That's a lot of fish" line, spoken in front of a mound of a lot of fish. The best I can do with that one is that it's an attempt to copy the Jurassic Park "pile of shit" moment, which is an actual joke for two reasons: it's kind of a play on words, and it has a swear in it. "That's a lot of fish" is nothing. It burbles out onto the screen and waits there patiently, until the moment dies of embarrassment. Most of the film's jokes follow the same trajectory.

This is, mind you, run-of-the-mill stuff. These are the basic problems true of most Emmerich movies, and many other tentpoles of the late '90s. What makes Godzilla so much worse than all of those is that it doesn't even have the goods as a trashy action film; it's shockingly incompetent, actually, ending up as one of the most leaden, painfully boring movies of its generation (its 139-minute running time is a crime against cinema if ever there was one). There is, to begin with, the simply inability to make Godzilla a real threat: when a film is a fantasy, like this, it becomes important for the filmmakers to establish the baseline reality of the fantasy world, so we can believe in it. That can't happen when the reality is as slipshod and inconsistent as it is here. I have no new observations: the fact that sometimes the monster shakes entire city blocks when it walks, and yet can get within yards of a man with headphones on without him noticing; the monster's tendency to change size, dramatically, not merely from scene to scene, but sometimes in consecutive shots. I mean that in the most literal sense: there are moments where its head is barely larger than the taxicab it's chasing, and then it suddenly can fill the entire entryway of a spacious New York subway station, in the span of just five seconds.

When the monster can't even be presented in a consistent way, and with so many shots of it interacting with objects seemingly hellbent on making that fact clear, there's no real way to believe in it or care about it, and that's what makes Godzilla such a damned easy film to nitpick: the way a trained biologist keeps using "he" to refer to a monster that is pregnant and reproduces asexually leaps to my mind, but it's almost too easy to pick out details. That doesn't just make the film dumb, it makes it not fun, since the creators' contempt for it is so apparent. I think that, more than anything, is the dominant feeling of the movie; Emmerich and Devlin took the project to have free reign to do anything they wanted, and proceeded to not give a shit. The cramped, human-sized staging of all the action, emphasising how reprehensibly uninteresting the humans in the movie are; the unendurable scene with baby Godzillas in Madison Square Garden, a scene that could only possibly be more of a rip-off of Jurassic Park and its raptors if David Arnold's score openly borrowed from the earlier film's kitchen sequence. And since it does borrow the music from that sequence, I guess this could not be any more of a Jurassic Park rip-off, and a particularly lazy and ineffective one it is, too. And since I have mentioned the music, it wouldn't do to pass up mentioning how often the score and the action don't match up: particularly when we and Niko get our first good view of Godzilla, and the music is all awe-inspired and Spielbergian, and the action of the film involves the giant animal being a kill-crazy deathbeast of pure horror.

Hell, the writers even go so far as to portray the mayor of New York as a craven blowhard named Ebert (Michael Lerner) with a simpering aide named Gene (Lorry Goldman), in tribute to the film critics who despised - and rightfully - the previous Emmerich/Devlin pictures, and then don't show Ebert getting crushed by Godzilla. In fact, he lives right to the end, to endure a tremendously unfunny comeuppance involving a thumbs down. When you skip that moment, you're simply not invested in making a crowd-pleaser whatsoever.

Which leaves us with just one thing to talk about, but it is maybe the most important thing, and I have intentionally left it: Patrick Tatopolous's monster design. It's not Godzilla. That's just fact. It is a different animal altogether, one that is not a dinosaur-shaped metaphor but an attempt to mimic the physiology of iguanas, if iguanas were hundreds of feet in length and bipedal.

In and of itself, totally irrespective of the thing it so utterly does not resemble, I have to be honest: I actually like the design. That makes me a horrible person, I know. But taking the filmmakers at their own goals, it's actually pretty effective, with the exception of its strangely overlong, very rectangular lower jaw. But I like the sleekness, the coloring, and the way it moves; during a scene set in Central Park at night, it clambers about like a Komodo dragon, and I will admit myself most impressed by both the idea and execution. The CGI used to bring the creature to life is decidedly spotty (it generally gets better as it goes along; the initial stamped through New York is especially terrible, with the monster possessing no apparent weight), but when it's good, it's as good as anything else from 1998; the baby Godzillas are quite terrible and fake-looking, but the whole 25-minute sequence containing them could and should be removed from the movie anyway, so it's not really a problem.

I might even go so far as to say that I like the American Godzilla enough that I kind of which that Godzilla '98 had kicked off a sequel. Not, for the love of God, one that had anything to do with Emmerich and Devlin. But in the hands of somebody who actually wanted to make a giant monster movie - and with another name attached - this particular giant monster has some merit to it, I think. Just not in the epic steaming shitpile that tried to foist it on an instantly-hostile public.

Read More

OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN

Throwback mania has been pillaging the visual style and narrative form of '70s and '80s movies for a while now, so I guess it was always going to be the case that we'd eventually get a '90s throwback; though the word "throwback" suggests something a little bit more self-aware and ironic than White House Down, in which the '90s director to end all '90s directors, Roland "Independence Day" Emmerich, parties like it's 1999, aided by writer James Vanderbilt, whose career didn't start until the 2000s, but has, based on the evidence of the film, been spending all of that time ready and eager to plunge right into the story tropes and dialogue of that recently bygone era.

Unlike so many '90s films, though, the form that WHD takes is not exactly "Die Hard in an X", with X referring in this case to the White House; it was this exact tack taken by this spring's Olympus Has Fallen, a cheaply-made rushed knock-off of WHD that, as it turns out, is almost precisely at the same quality level as the movie it was copying, though for different reasons. No, Emmerich's film turns out to be, well, Emmerich's film: a big, BIG riff on the '70s disaster formula with plot beats and character details that happen almost exactly the same way that they happened in ID4, or Godzilla, or even the 2000s '90s move The Day After Tomorrow.

So, for example, we have divorcée John Cale (Channing Tatum), whose 11-year-old daughter Emily (Joey King, a child actress I am beginning to admire very much) can barely stand him, owing to his non-stop fuckupitude and tendency to miss important events and expect his far-more-tolerant-than-she-needs-to-be ex-wife (Rachelle Lefevre) to bail him out. Cale is also working right now as the chauffeur for Speaker Raphelson (Richard Jenkins) of the House of Representatives, but trying his mightiest to get into the Secret Service, and as the film begins, he's finally managed to sweet-talk Jenna (Jackie Geary), a high-level staff member under the Vice President (Michael Murphy) into setting him up with an interview. Who should prove to be the interview, though, but Carol Finnerty (Maggie Gyllenhaal), high-ranking agent and apparently a former girlfriend, or even more likely a former one-night-stand, who regards Cale's unimpressive resume and personal history of never finishing anything he starts as exactly the wrong qualifications to bodyguard for the president. Now, in a traditional '90s Disaster-Structure Action Film, Cale would probably be at least two different people, but that's what makes this a contemporary gloss, or whatever.

This percolates: the film ends up talking an alarmingly long time to ramp up the action, in fact, and the opening sequences where we get to know the characters are all deeply tedious and stretched-out (though it's better than the utterly atrocious parody of human behavior and geopolitical illiteracy that open Olympus Has Fallen) - also a feature of the '90s action film, though probably not one being copied on purpose - feel like they're never going to end when we finally get to the point that a group of rabid militants led by ex-CIA operative Stenz (Jason Clarke), raging against the president for a whole host of reasons, execute a complicated plot to take over the White House. Cale and Emily happen to be on a White House tour at that exact time, and circumstances play out such that the Secret Service agent-in-charge Martin Walker (James Woods) loses track of his charge, and it falls solely to the isolated Cale to protect President James Sawyer (Jamie Foxx) through the violence and mayhem that play out through the rest of a very bad day, as it turns out that this was all ultimately driven by the ire of the military-industrial complex over the president's attempt to bring about peace in the Middle East by removing all U.S. forces from the region.

Which is the next '90s element fallen into place: White House Down is emphatically proud to be a liberal message movie (though one where the President can brightly point out that removing troops is just for theater, because all the actual killing is and will continue to be done by drones, and this is not perceived as a problem), with the villains all being explicitly tied to right-wing ideologies. It used to be very much the case that real-world domestic politics informed popcorn movies, and not even that long ago; all sorts of movies in all sorts of genres used to openly align themselves with (usually) Democratic or (much less often) Republican concerns, though mostly at a superficial level. The last decade and change have witnessed the two-party divide in the U.S. turning unusually bitter, while an explosion in the world cinema market has made it desirable for every halfway expensive movie to play for all audiences of all countries, and both of these have tended to suck the real-world politics out of every major film; but along come Emmerich and Vanderbilt, cheerfully sliming Republicans while making their obvious Barack Obama analogue an all-around terrific guy, whose deeply-held pacifism doesn't keep him from being an action hero.

None of which has a damn thing to do with the film's quality, though certainly, the fact that a movie about how the bad guys resist the peace process should be so free and easy with piling on the violent but sanitary deaths of a shitload of extras is an irony totally lost on the filmmakers, and you needn't have any more knowledge of realpolitik than you can glean from a glance of the front page of the New York Times to understand why the actions of, basically, every character but Cale make absolutely no damn sense (especially the two "real" villains above Stenz.

The problem with White House Down, you see, is not one of plausibility, ideology, or political messiness: it's that the film is contrived and dumb, the action lead-footed and CGI-addicted in all the very worst ways (it plainly cost more than Olympus, but that comes at the price of being bloated and having logy action). The last characteristically '90s touch in Vanderbilt's screenplay is the howlingly bad dialogue, which veers between crappy exposition (though in one delightful moment, a character tersely cuts off another for saying something they both already know) and grueling quips, that plod off the actors' tongues as if nobody involved had ever actually encountered humor, though several of them had at least heard about it (for Tatum, after a year of successes as a light-touch pseudocomic actor, this is particularly disappointing, and prove if it was needed that he should be prevented from making action movies.

Worse still, it's boring, taking too much time out to establish a geopolitical worldview that makes no sense and doesn't lend any credence to the action; while that action itself is dully pedestrian, with one of the cutting-edge sparkle of Independence Day (which is name-dropped) or the flat-out fucking weirdness of 2012. Lesser action movies built around more heinously unconvincing characters are released every single summer, but White House Down is still a big slab of tedium in its own right, and its chief merit as an action film in 2013 is that it has been cut according to a much more sedate rhythm than most of them. In terms of being in the leastways exhilarating, though, nothing of the sort. It's just braying and tepid and the promise that it was going to be a fun buddy action picture falls apart on the particularly empty-headed performances of Tatum and Foxx, draining the last trace of humanity from a movie that had very little to spare in the first place. And so it's all just so many noisy moments stitched together indifferently, with only the general raucousness of the picture clueing us in that any of this is meant to be entertaining.

4/10

Read More