Nothing like a nude walk on the beach.
Rebooting the unbootable.
Lotta talk on GODZILLA 2000 being Toho Company’s rejoinder to Tri-Star Pictures’ GODZILLA 1998 (directed by Roland Emmerich), the red-headed step-child of Godzilla canon. (Maybe Godzilla would have been revived anyway, as there was a five-year hiatus since his demise in DESTOROYAH.) Insofar as comparing this 2000 version to 1998, the storyline is about the same level of dumbass, with 2000 cheating a little by borrowing story elements from the original 1954 GODZILLA. Acting – about the same level, with 2000′s Japanese actors doing as insincere a job as 1998′s American actors. And special effects – well then, 1998 (which won a Saturn Award for Best Special Effects) blows 2000 outa the water like a H-bomb test perfectly executed.
So I don’t quite get this “reacquisition” of Godzilla by Japan and Toho Company. I mean, do you want Godzilla to look like a rubber suit instead of a photorealistic faux-dinosaur? Why not fly your guys over to America to partake of their effects houses and produce a Godzilla with the heart of yesterday and the effects of tomorrow?
Nope. Too logical. And logic has never been a strong point with every Godzilla movie post-1954.
So a guy-in-a-rubber-suit rises from the deep once more, in this first film of the Millennium series, and 26th Godzilla film overall. (Let me take a moment to clarify MY numbering of the Godzilla films and the official numbering. Toho’s original 1954 GODZILLA and their 1984 RETURN OF GODZILLA reboot were basically re-edited into wholly different movies for their American releases. It’s taken for granted these American releases are the “same” films as their Japanese originals. NO! They were not just English dubs with minor cuts for runtime; they were butchered with American jingoism and conceptually altered to become – in my educated opinion – completely different films, so I count those films as two more Godzilla canon films, AND I count America’s GODZILLA 1998 as a “Godzilla film” (isn’t it?!), making GODZILLA 2000 the 26th Godzilla film… but only the 23rd Toho canon film if you wanna be prissy about it.)
A scientist (Takehiro Murata, the Japanese Hank Azaria) wants to study this Godzilla, and the military guy (Hiroshi Abe, the Japanese Cary Grant) wants to kill it. Much like the dynamic in the original. There’s an irony in this movie borrowing elements from the original and claiming that none of the other movies in between itself and the original exist: merely two years later, GODZILLA AGAINST MECHAGODZILLA (2002) would claim the same thing, ignoring this movie!
There really is no way to “reboot” a franchise with so much history and legacy in its very fabric. GODZILLA 1954 is more a conceptual parable than a B-movie. To recapture the essence of what made that movie such a landmark, you’d have to recreate the paranoia of nuclear war, the reality of nuclear fallout disabling lives around you, your society under the Damoclean sword of nuclear abuse from other nations intent on an arms race for the sake of the race itself, not for safety or even capitalism. And you’d have to get a guy in a stinking hot rubber suit to go bananas on your toys…
That being said, they’re trying… they’re very trying…
We’ve got the Scientist, the Soldier, we’ll soon meet the Politician, and The Annoying Kid is introduced immediately, spouting jargon, as the daughter of the Scientist who runs the Godzilla Prediction Network.
A billion year old rock rises from the sea and turns into a spaceship that tries to terraform Earth – and Godzilla is there to stop it. For no reason as usual. But the new Godzilla suit design is looking mighty ferocious, and sits better in its environment. Some of the process shots and chroma-key are quite bearable (bringing the franchise up to being only forty years behind the rest of the world in special effects).
Note that the spaceship also “borrows” from Emmerich’s INDEPENDENCE DAY by shadowing the populace and landing on top of a skyscraper. (“Borrows” or “flips the bird”?)
Whenever the military appears in a Godzilla movie, my eyes glaze over. First, they tie down the spaceship with “unbreakable electromagnetic cables” but when it wants to fly off… it just does. Then a soldier boasts about “armor-piercing missiles” that will go through Godzilla “like crap through a goose!” Great, they’ve started using that old simile (from PATTON, 1970), which means they’re now only thirty years behind in filmmaking. Of course, the vaunted armor-piercers don’t go through anything – geese, Godzilla or crap. Helicopters turn up, fire. Nothing. Tanks fire. Nothing. That’s okay, keep firing. Maybe we’ll hit him while he’s not looking. Lemme ask: after the first twenty taxpayer-funded armor-piercers don’t work, why are you douchebags still firing? Talk to the glaze…
The scientist steps down into Godzilla’s giant footprint (homage to 1954) and retrieves cells that show Godzilla regenerates immediately (like Wolverine), and that if they could isolate that gene it would benefit humanity. Blah blah. A plot point that is only pertinent to one moment in the fight against the spaceship monster, when it tries to clone itself from Godzilla, and fails.
Orga The Insensitive
There is a CGI interlude before the spaceship turns into a guy-in-a-suit, which takes us right out of the movie and drops us on our heads. The graphic looks like the “wire-frame” diagrams used for special effects tests, or like the best effects the SyFy Channel has to offer. Then it sprouts tentacles, then after an interminable sequence that was like watching evolutionary paint dry, a monster coalesces called Orga apparently. It’s a vicious creature design, that is a cross between CLOVERFIELD, GODZILLA 1998 and a lobster muppet.
As Godzilla waddles off, triumphant yet again (in achieving what, I don’t know), someone chimes, “Why does he keep protecting us?” Waitaminute!… Only in the crapfest post-1960 canon did Godzilla turn into “mankind’s protector” – if you’re saying none of that exists, then the only other time you’ve met Godzilla was back in 1954 when he went through Tokyo like crap through a goose. This line doesn’t make any sense!
And Scientist’s reply makes even less sense: “Maybe because… Godzilla is inside each and every one of us!” —
Oh, no, he d’int!
There isn’t enough soap in the world to wash off how dirty I feel right now.
But wait! Maybe it’s not as cheeseball as it sounds. He’s talking about DNA, and didn’t Carl Sagan tell us that in the Earth’s forever-regenerating ecosystem, everything circulates on an atomic level? There’s nowhere else for cells to go except back into Earth’s ecosystem. Therefore, we are all made of the same elements; we are all starstuff… Ah, who am I kidding? The filmmakers weren’t paying tribute to Sagan, they were plagiarizing a platitude they’d heard in dumb American movies, to bring them up to only twenty years behind Western filmmaking…
Well, at least Godzilla doesn’t look like the Cookie Monster any more.
END
GODZILLA 2000 (Nov 1999) | PGaka: GOJIRA NI-SEN MIRENIAMU.
aka: GODZILLA VS. ORGA
aka: GODZILLA 2000 – MILLENNIUM.
Director: Takao Okawara.
Writers: Hiroshi Kashiwabara, Wataru Mimura, Michael Schlesinger.
Starring: Takehiro Murata, Hiroshi Abe, Naomi Nishida, Mayu Suzuki, Shirô Sano.
GODZILLA: Tsutomo Kitagawa. ORGA: Makoto Ito.
Version: English dub.
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2 Comments on “GODZILLA 2000”
Oh, Dunmore, you magnificent, self-proclaimed “critic,” with your endless, tortured rants about movies that, frankly, no one asked for. I have to give you credit — only someone of your inflated sense of superiority could spend an entire review bashing the film for not being what you want it to be, while conveniently ignoring the very foundation of what makes Godzilla the beast that he is.
“Rebooting the unbootable”? You think you’re some kind of cinematic prophet who has unlocked the true meaning of Godzilla and everyone else is just tragically out of step? Well, congrats on your special vision, because Godzilla 2000 doesn’t exist to cater to your pretentious thirst for authenticity in the most bizarre of ways. But no, here you are, casting aspersions on a film for not recreating the very thing you’re too busy beating off about — the 1954 Godzilla. Oh, it’s just not like the old days, is it? The horror of the nuclear age, the pessimism, the gloom. Well, guess what, Dunmore? The world moved on, and so did Godzilla.
You claim that “logic” is absent in Godzilla 2000 and lament that the filmmakers are “rebooting the unbootable,” as if you’re the only one who understands the stakes of resurrecting a franchise so old it needs a full set of dentures just to crawl to the theater. You’re not wrong that rebooting a long-established property is tricky. But here’s the thing: it’s called evolution, you uncaring, nostalgiac fossil. You want to talk about legacy? How about acknowledging that Godzilla himself is a reboot, a never-ending cycle of reinvention and reinvigoration? Are you so locked in your own outdated “rules” of cinematic appreciation that you can’t see the bigger picture? This franchise is built on change. Not to make some fake artistic statement about war or nuclear power in a way that reads like some hamfisted English Lit paper. No, it’s fun, it’s monsters smashing things, and sometimes that’s enough. But no. You, Dunmore, want to claw your way out of your own self-inflicted cinematic misery, slapping the filmmakers in the face for daring to evolve with the times. What do you want? A two-headed dragon laced with melancholy for every movie? What a monumental bore you are.
And then the grand pièce de résistance: “Godzilla is inside all of us!”
Oh, come off it. Don’t even try to claim you’re above the “cheesy” lines and forced metaphors when you, yourself, are constantly reveling in the lowest forms of cinematic self-flagellation. I mean, what do you call the entirety of your review but a glorified exercise in pushing that self-righteous button? “Oh, this movie doesn’t hold up to my intellectual standards.” Newsflash, Dunmore: Not everything has to be an existential thesis on humanity’s destruction. This is Godzilla, not your personal soapbox for empty, tedious screeds. Maybe it’s a cheesy line. Maybe it’s a metaphor. But if your brain can’t stretch to understand it in the context of a giant monster movie where science fiction doesn’t always need to be so on-the-nose, well, maybe the real problem lies with your own perspective.
And let’s talk about the special effects, shall we? The hallmark of your high-brow critique is that Godzilla’s rubber-suit battles from yesteryear were somehow pure cinematic art. Oh yes, back when it was all about people in suits, doing their very best to shuffle and lurch around the set while dodging miniature buildings. But now, oh no, CGI, that filthy cheat of the modern era, somehow ruins it for you. Godzilla 2000 is more ambitious, a little awkward in its infancy, but it’s trying. You can whine all day about CGI not “mimicking the soul” of rubber suits, but the reality is: the world changed, Dunmore. No one wants to watch a 50-year-old man sweating through a rubber suit anymore (and it’s not like you’d even appreciate the practical effects if they were done right). Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time measuring a movie’s worth by your own weird, outdated criteria, you’d notice the effort the filmmakers put in to modernize this relic of a genre. But no, the minute CGI comes into the picture, it’s “ruined,” because you’d rather stroke the past with one hand while wiping away the future with the other.
And then there’s your glorious final act of doublethink:
“Maybe because… Godzilla is inside each and every one of us!”
Ah yes, a line so saccharine that it might give you diabetes. And yet, as you cower in your arthritic ivory tower, you fail to notice something important: the film is trying to capture the fundamental connection between humanity and the beast. Not just through science, but through the very essence of what Godzilla represents. You’d rather dissect it for all its potential intellectual rigor, but it’s a monster movie, you dolt. Not everything needs to be an existential crisis wrapped in a radioactive bow. But you, forever the purveyor of “pure cinema,” would rather shake your head and condescendingly dismiss the fun because, god forbid, something dares to evoke a little more heart than you think is worthy of it.
In conclusion, Dunmore, you’re the kind of critic who spends too much time stroking your own inflated ego, lost in an idea of what Godzilla should be, while missing what it’s actually trying to do. The world of kaiju movies doesn’t need to fit into your mold of film snobbery and intellectual pretension. Godzilla is supposed to be a metaphor for something bigger, sure. But it’s also supposed to be fun, to knock down buildings and scream in a way that makes us all feel small in the face of something huge. And if you can’t understand that, Dunmore, maybe it’s time to take your “highbrow” attitude and shove it into the atomic breath of a passing lizard.“
Says in RAIDS AGAIN review, “ to release it in America, studio execs had to first cut it to shreds and add their own idiot narration because America Best Movie Champions”. Obviously, this is sarcasm, right? Then why say now, “ to bring them up to only twenty years behind Western filmmaking…”
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