One evening last fall, the Disco Biscuit and I walked out the front door of my building to find the entire block bathed in the glare of klieg lights. Other residents of the building stood stunned on the sidewalk while officious production assistants snarled, “Okay, people, you need to, like, get OUT of my SHOT.” The Biscuit, who used to do this sort of snarling and traffic-cone arranging for a living and thus colored himself unimpressed with the falsely authoritative tone of the PA assigned to my corner, hopped blithely over a barricade and started nosing around. While I waited for him and tried to avoid getting shooed out of my own neighborhood by some Mothra t-shirt-wearing brat behind whose ears USC film school had not yet dried, I watched Big K, one of the doormen from my building, returning from a successful scam on the Kraft services van. “Want some fries?” he asked me. At that point, the Biscuit reappeared with the news that the crew had cleared the block in order to take establishing shots for Godzilla, and that the computer-generated psycho lizard would step on the building next door to mine in the movie. I vowed to see the film when it came out so that I could watch my nabe get demolished by a giant scaly foot.

When the movie came out, I went to see it. After waiting patiently for nearly two hours, I did get to see Godzilla flatten a local restaurant, but by that time I felt so confused by the film that I couldn’t enjoy Fiori Ristorante’s untimely demise. So many elements of Godzilla made so little sense that by the time the closing credits rolled, I could say for sure only that the movie had sucked like a White House intern. I don’t understand what the filmmakers wanted to do with this movie – with whom they expected us to sympathize; whether they wanted to make an action movie or a camp classic; exactly which psychedelic drugs the casting director ingested before doling out the main roles; and why they didn’t call the props department and tell them to dig up that rubber suit and a scale model of New York City.

Let’s start with the camp question. For film buffs both casual and rabid, the Godzilla movies of old represent the apotheosis of the cheesy disaster flick genre – a completely unrealistic premise, monsters that all seemed to have zippers running up their backs, and a resolutely straight-faced presentation. So serious did these wrestling matches between two men in lumpy rubber costumes seem – accompanied by the doomsaying screech of violins on the soundtrack, and presented in the context of the nuclear disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that the films became cult classics. When Godzilla swatted irritably at a plane, viewers could see the string from which said plane dangled, but something about the intercut ground scenes (panicked city dwellers screaming and running down burning streets in the shadow of the lizard’s tail) made the films compelling. The Godzilla of 1998 couldn’t make up its mind about its camp status, and as a result wound up as neither a gripping action thriller nor an Aaron Spelling-esque camp-fest. In fact, G’98 can’t even decide how to present the title character. Clearly, the computer animation team spent a great deal of time perfecting the lizard-dinosaur hybrid (read: Jurassic Park rip-off) we see in the film – but if they wanted Godzilla to look less amateurish, perhaps they should have edited out the obvious blue-screen edges that appeared in several scenes, and perhaps they should have let us actually see Godzilla instead of hiding him behind various skyscrapers for the first hour.

The directors and producers also seemed to have a little trouble deciding who to cast as the hero and the villain, an issue which contributes to the schizoid personality of the film. Ostensibly, they want us to buy Godzilla as the villain – and yet not only do we not see any civilians killed by the monster (despite the fact that Godzilla causes the destruction of the Chrysler Building, the Flatiron Building, Madison Square Garden, several dozen other 50-plus-story buildings in the center of midtown, and most of the subway infrastructure), but supporting cast members make a point of telling us that they think the monster just wants food. In other words, despite the fact that Godzilla movies have historically painted the giant lizard as a nuclear-fallout mutant that has come to the city to avenge himself on the humans who have caused his nightmarish existence, and despite the fact that these movies make a point of showing a huge amount of carnage and destruction of property, G’98 characterizes the monster as merely a hungry expectant father, and on no fewer than three occasions we see Godzilla look into the eyes of a tiny human character, examine the little J.Crew-wearing snack closely, and decide against eating the human in favor of eating fish or running away or what have you. The US Army brings the entire weight of its Exocet and Scud technology to bear against Godzilla, after the lizard has already gone back to the sea. I just don’t get it – okay, he did break some stuff, but he obviously doesn’t intend any harm to mankind; he just couldn’t find a decent seafood restaurant. Someone could have just said, “This way to the South Street Seaport,” and saved everyone a lot of trouble.

And let’s not even talk about the end of the film. Godzilla, ensnared in the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, throws back his head and roars in despair. The humans have killed his babies, shot at him, and driven a taxi through his mouth, and now they send some serious explosives into his flanks to finish him off. His roars slowly decrease in volume. He slumps to the road surface. He whines. His eyes slowly close and the light in them disappears. When I saw Godzilla die – a poor misunderstood creature who, as a result of circumstances beyond his control, became the enemy of the selfish humans responsible for his plight – I felt like crying. Get up, I thought at the screen. Get up and pick your teeth with the Statue of Liberty. He didn’t get up. Then the so-called heros accepted the wild cheers of their fellow citizens of the world. Excuse me, but you just killed a creature that you created, that intended you no harm, and this makes you a hero? Did the filmmakers really expect us to sympathize with the humans? I mean, every time Godzilla disappeared around a corner or hopped over Grand Central Station, I wanted to cheer, and when the short-sighted morons that spotted Godzilla as the enemy instead of their own foolish decision to test nuclear weapons on their own planet opened fire on him and missed, I wanted to applaud.

Unfortunately, this lesson got hopelessly lost on the creators of G’98, as did a number of other lessons, like “do not put an irrelevant love story with no chemistry in an action-disaster movie,” or “do not cast talent-free sitcom graduates in leading roles,” or “once in a while, moviegoers enjoy dialogue that doesn’t suck.” I found the casting of this picture nothing short of unforgivable. Matthew Broderick, the gold standard of cute ‘n’ sensitive leading men, does not belong in this film, but I guess they couldn’t find anyone else that we would buy as a Russian-speaking biologist. Maria Pitillo as the curly blonde love interest does not belong in any movie. A button nose does not an actress make, and although the role as written didn’t give Pitillo much to work with, she managed to torpedo any budding interest in her Scoop-Brady subplot by whining and pouting instead of acting (they even dubbed her screams, a classic Godzilla staple that seemed weird here). The silly stereotypes of Hank Azaria’s cameraman and his Nails ‘R’ Us wife could have given the film more of a campy flavor, but unfortunately, putting “Animal” in the same scenes with Jean Reno cancelled that out. (And may I say to the film and television industries, and for that matter to the world at large, on the subject of Animal’s wife’s “accent” – Brooklyn and New Jersey? NOT THE SAME. Brooklyn accents and New Jersey accents? NOT THE SAME. Brooklyn? Borough. New Jersey? State. NOT THE SAME. Please learn the goddamn difference between a Brooklyn accent and a New Jersey accent [and a Long Island accent, also not the same], and please stop using “Brooklyn” and “New Jersey” as synonyms for “low-class,” “tacky,” “loud,” and “provincial.” NOT THE SAME.)

I felt almost as sorry for Reno, a consummate professional with more acting ability in the tip of his broken nose than the rest of the cast combined, as I did for Godzilla. Watching him grimace his way through flat-footed “jokes” about French people and coffee, or French people and donuts (memo to the producers – please do not confuse the adjectives “French” and “backward unwashed naif.” Even the most sheltered French citizen knows the difference between a donut and a croissant. Play the Jerry Lewis card if you must, but don’t ask us to accept “he’s French” as a punchline). Reno’s Elvis imitation could have saved the movie if they had thought to use it as a running gag, but they relied instead on the Siskel-and-Ebert mayor joke for humor. (I sincerely hope Ebert made them pay for their insolence in his review.) The presence of his character in the film made no intuitive sense, and yet only he made the film bearable.

All in all, I found the film irresponsible and silly. The love “story” probably got edited in after the rest of the shooting had finished, and it shows. We never find out how the Army managed to evacuate 8 million people in 3 hours. Nobody ever apologizes to us for casting Matt, Queen Of Melrose as a clueless Army goober. They set up the sequel about an hour into the film, and the minute I saw that ominous egg quaking, I had my suspicions confirmed – G’98 represents the most cynical, unevolved, pandering, market-driven arrogance of the film industry. They recycled a proven quantity, came up with a good slogan (“Size Does Matter”), and let the rest of the chips fall where they may. But never mind the cynicism and carelessness that characterizes the film as a whole. I feel even more disturbed by the attitude towards nuclear testing and our subsequent responsibility, as a race, to understand and make amends for what happened in the aftermath of bomb explosions. The original Godzillas made perfect sense to the Japanese; the nation itself witnessed unimaginable mutations and hundreds of thousands of deaths, and thus the advent of a terrifying and pissed-off lizard seemed not only logical but in line with what Japan had already endured at the hands of nuclear weapons. G’98 opens with a lyrical, orange-toned sequence that shows the Bikini Atoll tests in an almost nostalgic light. The mushroom clouds unfold with stately beauty, and in the next frames, plants and trees vaporize, while the little creatures look on with wide-eyed innocence. The filmmakers ask us to accept this as the genesis of Godzilla (actually, as Pitillo’s character so pretentiously reminds us, “It’s ëGojira,’ you idiot”), and yet when Godzilla comes into inadvertent contact with humans, the humans turn on him with grim determination. Even Reno’s character, sent by the French Secret Service to take care of the problem, has more of an interest in avoiding embarrassment for his country than in closely examining the reasons behind Godzilla’s existence.

I don’t ask moviemakers to approach all of their films with a social conscience. Movies, after all, function primarily as entertainment and escape. But this movie functioned solely as a Happy-Meal tie in. It missed utterly every single point it could have made. And considering that, in the sequel, the avengers may well come from India and Pakistan, perhaps the brains behind G’98 should give that some thought.

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