So, Godzilla hit theaters, and the audience hit back. Yes, it did almost $75 million in six days. Not good enough. Krillian’s List has floated around the ‘Net pretty quickly. (Ain’t It Cool News ran it, without crediting Krillian, under the title “Nitpickers Attack Godzilla.” I guess all of you who write me anytime I say anything less-than-generous toward Harry will really be angry if I suggest that payback for trips to Las Vegas and New York care of Dean Devlin and Sony is a bitch, so I won’t. If you want to write, please do, but I’ve heard the one that goes, “Harry’s God and David’s just jealous,” so if you write, try to come up with something new to explain my treating Harry with the same honest contempt with which I treat every other media outlet.)
I have gotten letters ripping the quality of the CG (computer graphics) in Godzilla, but I don’t buy the “90 percent of Godzilla‘s CG is bad” line. The CG on the monster and the airplanes is remarkable. Geez, compared to Deep Impact, this thing was CG Stradivarius. There have been a myriad complaints about the rain. That’s an artistic choice, not just a CG cover. It’s as though people read that the rain could help hide the lines of the CG and started to think of the rain only as a fix. It’s kind of like complaining that the movie was set in New York. You can disagree with the choice, but to rage against it as though it were an insult to your intelligence seems a little overboard.
(WARNING: The first part of this paragraph shouldn’t spoil the movie for you, but it might. If you are really sensitive to spoilers, skip to the next paragraph.)
I have gotten letters complaining about Devlin and Emmerich stealing from other movies, but Devlin and Emmerich meant to be stealing from other movies. It’s called homage. The heartbeat from King Kong. The monster doing a far more intense job on a fishing boat than Jaws did. Godzilla “climbing” the side of a skyscraper. Not to mention the obviously obvious ones: Siskel and Ebert, the name Tatopoulos and the name Gojira which leads to the American bastardization, Godzilla.
(WARNING TWO: The following is definitely a spoiler, though I’ll bet you already know it’s coming.)
I’ve certainly had a massive number of letters slamming the design of Godzilla as too close to the T-Rex and the babies as too close to Raptors from Jurassic Park. But to that, I ask, what did you expect them to do? What would satisfy this audience? Redoing the man in the rubber suit version of Godzilla would certainly generate every bit as much rage as this one has. More. Jurassic Park was the culmination not only of the CG revolution, but was the first movie to acknowledge our understanding of the real physiology of dinosaurs. If Godzilla was going to be what he was born as, the representation of an animal mutated by nuclear radiation, I would say that what they came up with was a damned reasonable representation. And what were the babies supposed to be from there? Should they have been unrelated to the design of Godzilla?
(SPOILER-SAFE ZONE RESTARTS): Frankly, I don’t think Devlin and Emmerich could have come up with a movie that would have satisfied everyone. It’s really easy to say (as I’ve heard 100 times this weekend), “That wasn’t the real Godzilla!” Well, tell me specifically what you would have done. Faced with a world of criticism, I believe that Devlin and Emmerich made choices based on their instincts. They made the monster a real animal with very few mutations other than size; made it a rainy movie; hired Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno and wrote the script around their unique personalities as actors; and came up with some good surprises, but didn’t break their necks (or the internal logic of the film) to avoid what others have done with similar technology. Had the first new generation Batman movie been a Joel Schumacher version, Warner Bros. would have been strung up by fandom. Remember that Tim Burton was raged against before his version was seen, but he hit enough of the right notes, particularly in the casting of the very heroic hero and the very psychotic villain, to have fans accept the film.
Which brings me to one simple but critical flaw with Godzilla. There’s no villain. Godzilla is not evil. Jean Reno‘s character is not evil. The military and mayor of New York are stupid, but not evil. How can you have a monster movie with no bad guy? Conversely, where are the heroes? If audiences really cared about any of the four lead characters, lots of people would have liked the movie better. Great actors, not much passion. In fact, Jean Reno was more passionate at the press junket about his character’s reasons for doing what he does and for him to take on the role, than his character was in the movie. Hank Azaria was clearly a lot more fun on the set than he turned out to be on-screen. Does he ever get a moment in this film as fun as when he laughs hysterically into the camera? That moment was about five minutes after his character is introduced. Maria Pitillo is scenery. Not her fault. She plays an incompetent person. We have no stake in her succeeding. And Matthew Broderick neither raged at the army’s attitude about Godzilla or joined in with any bloodlust. Heroes can’t stay in the middle of the road.
Finally, I blame myself. Amongst a world of others. Godzilla was hidden until the film hit. We all hyped the film based on buzz and the way things go in these monster situations. What did we expect you to expect? I don’t know. But apparently, many of you didn’t get what you wanted. Maybe if you didn’t expect the film to change the world, you would have liked it better. I think that Men in Black suffered some hype backlash last summer. Titanic succeeded with some backlash against the anti-hype. Godzilla will make more than Deep Impact. It also cost more. But their profit picture is likely to be pretty similar in the end. Deep Impact will always be remembered as a surprise hit. And Godzilla, even if it manages to generate $400 million worldwide, will be seen as a miss. But that’s not the whole truth. It’s hard to live a life examining something you love so closely every day. It’s easy to get sucked into apathy and quick, harsh criticism. Maybe this profession, from here to Entertainment Weekly to Harry Knowles to “Extra” and “Hard Copy” is beginning to do that to you. Maybe you know too much, think about it too much and expect to much. I hate to sound like a character from Network (and I don’t want you to turn off your computer and shout out of your window) but maybe we were all asking a little too much from a film about a giant irradiated lizard.
READER OF THE DAY: This Godzilla review came from General Patton. Never let it be said that I don’t respect (or print) my elders: “Anyone who knows what the Enola Gay is (not just close, but can explain it) should NOT (repeat N-O-T) see this movie. It is strictly for young people. Strictly. Oh, what a bad movie. It is worse than Independence Day (which is worse than the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes). What a waste of several jillion dollars, except, of course, to Sony who will make a bundle off the masses. (A shudder passes over his body, as he says this.) I liked Godzilla when he looked more like Barney than a deranged escapee from Jurassic Park. Am I clear?”

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