Godzilla
From AwardAnnals
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| Director(s) | Roland Emmerich |
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| Distributor | Sony Pictures |
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| As “gigantic monster reptile attacks New York” movies go, you’ve got to admit that Godzilla delivers the goods, although its critical drubbing and box-office disappointment were arguably deserved. It’s a shameless, uninspired crowd-pleaser that’s content to serve up familiar action with the advantage of really fantastic special effects, and if you expect nothing more you’ll be one among millions of satisfied customers. There’s really no other way to approach it—you just have to accept the fact that Independence Day creators Roland Emmerich and Dean… | |
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
As “gigantic monster reptile attacks New York” movies go, you’ve got to admit that Godzilla delivers the goods, although its critical drubbing and box-office disappointment were arguably deserved. It’s a shameless, uninspired crowd-pleaser that’s content to serve up familiar action with the advantage of really fantastic special effects, and if you expect nothing more you’ll be one among millions of satisfied customers. There’s really no other way to approach it—you just have to accept the fact that Independence Day creators Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin are unapologetic plagiarists, incapable of anything more than mindless spectacle that can play in any cinema in the world without dubbing or subtitles. The whole movie plays out like a series of highlights stolen from previous blockbusters of the 1990s; it’s little more than a rehash of the Jurassic Park movies. The derivative script is so trivial that it’s unworthy of comment, apart from a few choice laughs and the casting of Michael Lerner as New York’s mayor, whose name is Ebert and who closely resembles a certain well-known movie critic. Perhaps that’s a clever hint that this movie’s essentially critic-proof. It’s stupid but it’s fun, and for most audiences that’s a fitting definition of mainstream Hollywood entertainment. —Jeff Shannon
Barnes and Noble
Everybody loves Godzilla, the irradiated giant monster that first terrorized, then defended Japan throughout the Cold War and beyond. The first official Western entry to the series, GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS, was recut from Inoshiro Honda’s original blockbuster GOJIRA. Interspersing English-language scenes starring Raymond Burr as an American reporter, the film follows a dinosaur—resurrected by underwater nuclear testing—as it emerges from the sea to flatten Tokyo. The result is a massively entertaining peek at postwar nuclear paranoia. As a living, fire-breathing embodiment of the A-bomb, Godzilla inflicts random acts of carnage and radioactive destruction on the populace. The metaphor extends to Burr’s detached Americanism and to the ironic use of another doomsday weapon to destroy a monster created as a nuclear side effect in the first place. The menacing Godzilla is ultimately just a guy in a rubber suit stomping on models while actors speak in laughably dubbed dialogue, but that’s the fun part. If you know only the recent American version, you owe it to yourself to check out the real thing. Amy Robinson
