The Problem with GINO

So, as the title of this blog will suggest, I sure I’m not the first to say that Rolland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla was a massive pile of crap. A terrible mess 90s CGI, Jurassic Park envy, Matthew Brodrick, and cheap shots at Siskel and Ebert whose only redeeming quality was the presence of Jean Reno, one of my favorite French things, it's name will forever go down in history as one the great hollywood fuck ups. But the primary flaw of GINO (Godzilla in Name Only, at least according to tvtrope) is one that isn’t one on a technical one, or even an acting level (Jean Reno manages to just barely cancel out Brodrick in my book), but on a symbolic level.

You see, the best monsters to symbolically represent something, be it topical to it’s time (like the original Godzilla) or a basic part of the human condition or psyche. Xenomorphs represent rape. Brundlefly represented, and still represents (although not entirely intentionally), the then burgeoning AIDs epidemic. Dracula represented the repressed sexual tension of the Victorian era. And Godzilla/Gojira, well he represents the Bomb. Or, to be more specific, Hiroshima.

Having watched the very first Godzilla before it had been turned into the massive Kaiju--Japanese monster movie--franchise it is now, I can tell you that the symbolizism is there and it is as clear as day. The movie opens with scenes of ruined buildings and people in stretchers, while a narrator sets the scene:

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"This is Tokyo. Once a city of six million people. What has happened here was caused by a force which up until a few days ago was entirely beyond the scope of Man's imagination. Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world. There were once many people here who could've told of what they saw... now there are only a few."

If that doesn’t send a tingle down the spine, then I don’t know what will. If they’d replaced “Tokyo” with “Hiroshima” then you’d swear they were talking about the Bomb. It’s probably one of the more haunting metaphors for Nuclear destruction I’ve seen put to film.

While “Gojira” was definitely a very cathartic experience for the Japanese, “Godzilla” managed to speak to U.S. audiences as well. The titular lizard’s slow gait and near indestructable nature, like the zombies of the cold war era, represent the slow but sure approach that the world was making towards nuclear armeggedon.

That all being said, lets look at our culprit, GINO. Whereas the original Godzilla had the fifties, a time rife for the powerful symbolism inherent in the monster movie the, the nineties was a pretty boring time. Despite being made by Emmerich, the kind of director who made a living off of such destruction movies, there wasn’t really much in the nineties for Godzilla to be juxtaposed to. There was no threat of nuclear annihilation or even any paranoia about communism taking over. There wasn’t even 9/11. All there really was was Jurassic Park, whose success GINO aggressively tries to emulate like every other Disney blockbuster from John Carter to the Lone Ranger tries to emulate the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, throwing the essentials at us, but forgetting the damned point. This is evident in the way GINO was slimmed down and made all the more t-rex like. But the Jurassic Park trilogy worked due to the way in mixed every little boy’s love of dinosaurs with some genuinely good cinematography and a perfect balance of practical and digital special effects—a balance which I feel doesn’t get anywhere near as much love as it should these days—making it look as good today as it did back then. GINO on the other hand, as mentioned before, is an ungodly clusterfuck of terrible looking 90s CGI which manages the feat of making sy-fy channel original features look realistic by comparison.

Not only that, but the very fact that they tried—and failed, but that’s not the point of this paragraph—to emulate Jurassic Park just goes to show how little the directors got the original Godzilla. The original Gojira’s slow gait, while certainly a repercussion of the limitations of practical effects of time, hammered home the point. He may not have been that fast, but it didn’t matter because he was unstoppable. Throw as many mortars, bullets and missiles you like at the great beast, but it didn’t do squat in the end, because Godzilla was a juggernaut. A force of un-nature that will destroy everything in it’s path. Like, you know, the A-bomb.

How it can work, in my opinion

For those of you who pay attention, you may have heard that there’s another American Godzilla being made, this time by Garth Edwards, the guy who made Monsters (no, not that one, that one), which is a good sign, seeing as how Monsters at least got that monster movies can have very real allegorical value. And while Movie Bob, my go-to guy for movie reviews, might've panned Monsters, I for one am cautiously optimistic.

That being said, in my opinion, it would work best if they did exactly what the remake of King Kong did, and set it in the same time period as the original. This way, the movie could focus on the tension between the americans and the Japanese, as well as give more depth to Serizawa's sacrifice in the end. At the time, the Japanese were probably afraid of saying anything too overt about Hiroshima, seeing as how they were the losers in WWII.

Or they could go all out and just do an over-the-top homage to Kaiju flicks in general, but then they’d be ripping Pacific Rim off wholesale, and the mistakes of the past would continue be ignored.