Entertainment >
Movie Reviews
Get a Widget for this title
RSS FeedWould the movie 'Godzilla' have been more successful with a different name?
Results so far:
| No | 85% | 317 votes | Total: 372 votes | |
| Yes | 15% | 55 votes |
No
Write now
Print
Invite a writer™
Add to Favorites1998's Godzilla is such a bloated weak story that its only strength is in its name. Beyond that it creates nothing original, and pays no homage to its predecessor. It sits in the bland world of being nothing but CGI effects.
There is something about the Hollywood remake that confuses me. When they remake, why do they feel compelled to duplicate everything including the titles, and characters? How can they be so unable to reach either way? How can I ever see a movie title with Pink Panther in its name and not think about Peter Sellers? There is no way that Steve Martin, who is an amazing comic talent, can answer that. Why not create a new, Sellers inspired character and explore that?
So it is with Godzilla.
The monster of the early Godzilla films is so iconic and campy, that remaking the character would need the efforts of top notch storytelling, which Roland Emmerich lacks. The movie itself is not bad. Its Predictable and formulaic but at least the formula works. Hollywood, with its bloated price tags and overstaffed teams, and ridiculous deadlines looks to make a profit by taking as few risks as possible. The summer movie formula works at the box office.
The problem is the genre. Godzilla isn't a monster movie genre. Godzilla is a genre unto itself. It is a camp movie's camp movie. How do you think of the name without the exaggerated serrated back fins or the cardboard miniature houses filmed with the largest camera available? These things define Godzilla.
But CGI teams look at this and say to themselves, we can make it better than before; more real, more interactive. We can make the monster believable. Great. I like it. But that is not Godzilla. That's a new monster and a new character updating an old rich genre. By the time you are done, it doesn't look like Godzilla.
The monster is a Godzilla shape, but also takes from Jurassic Park, and shows only small callbacks to the original. The 1998 monster shows a lot less personality and a lot more destructive capacity. Did it need to be Godzilla? It lacked any true redefinition of the campy genre, showed no evidence of franchise capability, and did not create a story any better than the Japanese productions that made Saturday afternoon TV watchable for kids. It could have had many other names and even more original creature designs that could push it enough to be something very different.
I'm even betting that the artists conceived many different creatures for Godzilla some that were outrageous and others that were very innovative and iconic. I will further bet that the producers rejected those saying things like "It doesn't look a thing like Godzilla." Then somebody could have responded with "well the story will be the same, we'll just replace Godzilla with Killizard or some other name." It's just that simple. Certainly screenwriters have a find and replace feature on their computers, right?
But no, that won't happen. Hollywood knows that there is a name they can sell. They don't care how bad the cereal tastes so long as there is a recognizable cartoon animal on the cover. That's why they keep the name. It's not about homage or nostalgia, its about marketing. They know grown-ups watched those movies as kids they know the name means something and we want to see how they interpret that monster. It's a bait and switch campaign that brings in the money but leaves us feeling duped.
In defense of those same movie makers, maybe that's what it takes. Maybe costs and budgets require this overly safe formula. You just can't take chances with millions of dollars right? Maybe so, unless you get an innovative gutsy upstart, like say, J.J. Abrams, and see what happens. Cloverfield created a Godzilla type monster and low key way of working around it. This is a movie about the people and how they are being affected personally by the monster. It certainly had its detractors, who hated the first person perspective, but its box office success and critical success combined to make a movie more memorable than Godzilla and put a sequel in discussion.
Godzilla had a budget of about 125 million and took in 135 million domestically. That's about an 8 percent profit, and is barely break even. However, it did another 239 million internationally and made about twice its original budget back gross ticket sales. Not bad. Cloverfield cost 25 million and grossed 170 million worldwide, with 80 million domestic and 90 million international, giving it a return of 6 times above the original budget.
If we leave the monster movie genre we can look at other remakes. Hitchock's Psycho was remade as closely as a remake can be. Not only is the plot and the title the same, it is a shot by shot duplicate of the original. Talk about playing it safe. With a 20 million dollar budget and a 37 million dollar return, nobody found it successful financially or critically. Disturbia remade Hitchock's The Rear Window as a teen suspense. Its quality in no way compares to the styles of Hitchock, nor does the acting compete. But the story has appeal and it doesn't try to just copy. The result is a movie that sells four times above the budget at the box office.
It seems silly that producers can't be even a little daring in their remakes. Good stories retold with a fresh perspective, different characters and structure can be successful. Good stories warmed up as a leftover have a history of dropping off the map. Godzilla is actually a reasonably successful film, but nobody is standing in line for part two. This is the real failure. This is the day of the franchise. Filmmakers seek to create films that will sell not only themselves, but their future productions. If this is to be, filmmakers need to reexamine how to freshen up the old stories they seem determined to use.
Can it be done? Anybody seen The Dark Knight yet?
Learn more about this author, Bobby B. Paul.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.
Yes
Clearly, the Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich version of "Godzilla" (1998) was a disaster on many, many levels. By no means was this a good movie. However, at least some of the fault has to be attributed to the perceptions that the filmmakers put in place by associating their giant iguana movie with one of cinema's most popular and successful franchises. The question before us is not whether this would have been a "better" movie had it borne another title, but whether or not it would have been more successful.
Toho Studio's Gojira (or Godzilla, as he was rechristened when he was exported for Western audiences), was born as the result of three separate incidents: the Allied bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the first hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll that was held on March 1, 1954, and the resulting contamination of the Japanese tuna fishing boat, Diago Fukuryu Maru that caused international outrage and resulted in the deaths of several crewmen.
Considering the world's fears about the unleashed power of nuclear weapons, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka envisioned a giant monster, transformed by radiation, that would emerge from the sea and devastate Tokyo. This monster, soon named Gojira - a conflation of the Japanese words meaning "gorilla" and "whale" - would be a potent allegory for the horror unleashed upon the world in 1945. Japan, as the only nation to suffer such destruction, was in a unique position to make this movie. Tanaka enlisted Ishiro Honda to direct the film, and Eiji Tsubarya to create the special effects. The result was a thoughtful and intriguing movie with a clear and dire message: Don't release forces that you cannot control. In "Gojira" (1954), the monster is only stopped by the heroic sacrifice of a brilliant scientist, who takes the secret of the weapon that destroys Godzilla, a weapon that he foresees falling into the wrong hands and being used for harmful purposes, to his grave, ending the threat of one monster without unleashing or creating an even greater menace. Of course, when the film was re-edited for Western audiences, much of the political content was removed, resulting in a typical matinee monster movie, albeit a very successful and popular one.
Unfortunately, when Devlin and Emmerich set out to film their own version of Godzilla, they ignored all these basics elements that have contributed so greatly to the King of the Monster's popularity over the years. In their inept hands, Godzilla was transformed from a potent nuclear allegory to a simple mutated iguana. Gone also were all the physical characteristics that kaiju ("monster" in Japanese) fans have associated with Godzilla over the years, including the prominent dorsal spines and the highly recognizable roar. Once Devlin and Emmerich were done, they had reduced Japan's biggest movie star to just another giant monster, little discernible from the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the Ymir from "20 Million Miles to Earth" (1957), or the T-Rex from the "Jurassic Park" films.
If the producers had presented the resulting monster as "Iguano-Rex" or "Titanodon," or something like that, they might have stood a decent chance of presenting an enjoyable, albeit mindless, giant monster movie. With no expectations, a story about a mutated sea iguana that grows to giant size and terrorizes a city, eventually laying its eggs inside Madison Square Garden, could have been respectable escapist summer fare. However, they insisted on tying their creature to Toho's legendary monster, and that's where the movie really suffers.
If, as a filmmaker, you tell your audience that you're going to present a movie about Abraham Lincoln, they expect to see America's 16th President, a tall, thin man with a beard and a stovepipe hat who was Chief Executive during the Civil War and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. If, however, your movie, titled Abraham Lincoln, is about a scruffy high school kid who cuts class with his friends, rides a motorcycle, and plays "Civil War: The Video Game," your audience is going to cry foul, and rightly so. Even if the resulting movie is Academy Award worthy, your audience will rebel, as you've set up certain expectations in their minds by calling your movie "Abraham Lincoln;" expectations you've failed to meet.
Such was the problem with Devlin and Emmerich's "Godzilla." They advertised and promoted one thing and then gave us another. In spite of their title, Godzilla is nowhere to be seen in their movie. This, then, becomes its biggest liability. With any other title, expectations would have been lowered, and audiences would have been able to enjoy this movie on a level free from any association with Toho's legendary creature. That being said, it's very probable that the movie would have enjoyed greater success as a result of its lowered/different expectations. Was their film a decent, watchable, giant monster movie? Sure it was. Was it Godzilla? Absolutely not.
Learn more about this author, John Petty.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.
