Godzilla (1998)

Rating: 25%
The main reason why I decided to finally watch this movie again on top of reviewing it is just to find out what I'd think about it compared to when I saw it the first time. Because while everyone talked about how it was crap over the years, I just remembered being scared as heck to go see it. *audience snickers* Hey! I was only 7 years old! *audience goes 'ooooohhhh' and nods at each other going 'that makes a little bit of sense'* But anyway, with one scary memory faced with realizing a movie that was just crap, this in my review for Godzilla.

Plot: A nuclear test in French Polynesia causes a lizard nest to be destroyed from the blast of the atom bomb. But one egg survives only to be mutated causing the baby lizard to to develop atavistic traits of ancestral reptilian species. Eventually this turns it into a giant lizard that attacks a Japanese fishing vessel and eventually New York. So the military is trying to stop it while Dr. Nick Tatopoulos is assigned to try to figure out what it wants and try to stop it.

Okay so here's the thing. Despite how scared I was to even think that my parents would have the nerve to make me see the movie, my oh-so young mind left me to believe that there was some sort of decent characters and storytelling that I saw while being oh so super scared. And yet here I am today almost 23 years old and have seen it for the first time since then and realizing that not only was I wrong about not having any decent characters or storytelling, but all the rough exposition that I did remember was just thrown there and that was kind of it. It turned out that this film focused more on explosions and chases and special effects then anything else. I mean I knew this movie was going to turn out bad, but I figured there would be at least a pretty good amount of character/story development even if it's bad development. I particularly felt that way with the relationship between Nick and Audrey. I thought there was more to their realtionship that I just didn't pay attention to the first time. But it turns out that they barely talked about their past, had only one scene together before they have their moment where one is mad at the other as they're talking in the rain, and aside from one or two moments, the rest of the film was just them running from Godzilla and his kids. All that aside, the action was a little silly with how easily the military kept not hitting Godzilla.  I mean sometimes it made sense because he somehow had some good agility or something like that supposedly, but still. Oh! And this is kind of the kicker. This bad thing is unique but... they do a  really crappy job at what they were trying to do. The makers of the films were also the people who made Stargate and Independence Day which rightfully got bad reviews. But they seemed to be really pissed when famous critics Siskel and Ebert gave it bad reviews. So in response to that, they made satirized versions of both critics as two supporting characters in the movie to try to insult them. But they didn't really take advantage of the oppertunity of making fun of the critics. In fact Siskel himself stated "If you're going to go to the trouble of putting us in a monster movie, why don't you at least take advantage of having the monster either eat and squash us." So the really interesting yet completely messed up thing is that they're trying to get back at these critics, and they do a remarkably sloppy job at even doing that. 

And that's my review for Godzilla. What I thought was a scary movie that might've had decent characters and story, turned out to be a movie focused on just effects and explosions with all the possible exposition just thrown at but never really developed. And it's a movie that's bad in a unique way because they spend a portion of the time trying to get back at Siskel and Ebert for previous bad reviews, but don't really take advantage of it which is both stupid and really sad. It's a very poorly done movie, not worth your time.