by Bobby B. Paul

Created on: August 09, 2008

1998'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

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