It’s shocking that it took over forty years for an American Godzilla movie to be produced… but when one arrived, many were left wishing it had taken longer. The movie didn’t even deliver the Godzilla we were familiar with. The iconic monster was completely re-designed – and not for the better. So the film immediately earned a bad reputation. And now, we’re going to dig into What Happened to Godzilla ‘98.
American distributors bought the rights to show kaiju movies made by Japan’s Toho Studios in the States and Hanna-Barbera made a Godzilla cartoon, but studios took their time deciding to make their own live-action Godzilla movie. Hollywood had their first chance in 1983. Toho gave director Steve Miner, fresh off of making two Friday the 13th sequels, permission to shop around his own Godzilla project. It was to be a 3-D movie set in the San Francisco area during the Cold War. A screenplay was written by Fred Dekker, who would go on to make Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad. Storyboards were drawn. Rick Baker and David Allen were going to handle the special effects… But no studios wanted to provide the thirty million dollar budget.
A decade passed. Then TriStar Pictures bought the rights to make a Godzilla trilogy from Toho in 1992. Toho was producing a new era of Godzilla films at the time. But, not wanting to flood the market with simultaneous Japanese and U.S. productions, they put the King of the Monsters on hiatus in Japan. With TriStar’s Godzilla looking likely to get a 1996 release, Toho made the “death of Godzilla” film Godzilla vs. Destoroyah in ‘95. After which, the intention was for Godzilla to go dormant at Toho until the character’s fiftieth anniversary in 2004. Speed director Jan de Bont was hired to make TriStar’s Godzilla, working from a screenplay by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. That script had Godzilla doing battle with the Gryphon, an alien creature that rides to Earth on a meteor and creates a form for itself using DNA gathered by monstrous bats. It ends up having the body of a puma, the wings of a bat, and a tongue composed of snakes.
Miner and Dekker’s Godzilla kept the basics of the kaiju intact: he was a prehistoric creature awoken and mutated by a nuclear detonation. Elliott and Rossio gave him a more complicated history. He first shows up where the Soviets have been dumping nuclear reactor cores. But he didn’t start his life as a simple dinosaur. Rather, he was the creation of an ancient civilization that spliced dinosaur DNA to create a monster that could fight off an alien force. Long ago, Godzilla thwarted an invasion of DNA-collecting aliens like the Gryphon. Then he was kept in stasis in a tank of amniotic fluid for millennia, waiting for the aliens to return. Now he has purpose again. And he fights the hybrid monster to the death in New York City. Stan Winston was set to do the effects for the de Bont film, designing the Gryphon and planning to make a Godzilla with the traditional look. It’s the cost of things that eventually killed that version of Godzilla. TriStar didn’t want to put up the one hundred and twenty million dollar budget de Bont required. So de Bont went off to make Twister instead.
Director Roland Emmerich and collaborator Dean Devlin were about to have huge success with their film Independence Day. They were known for delivering event movies on reasonable budgets: Stargate cost fifty-five million, Independence Day seventy-five million. So TriStar offered them the chance to develop their own take on Godzilla. At first, they were hesitant. But they asked production designer Patrick Tatopoulos to draw some concept art, to come up with his own design of Godzilla. And when they saw how Tatopoulos envisioned the monster, they agreed to make the movie.
Elliott and Rossio receive “story by” credits on the finished film, but Emmerich and Devlin started over from scratch. They assured the studio that they would be able to make the movie for less than one hundred million. But then Independence Day was a hit, so TriStar increased the budget they had to work with. Officially, the final film cost one hundred and thirty million. More than the price that got the de Bont version shut down. But some reports say it was closer to one hundred and fifty million.
Emmerich and Devlin also reworked Godzilla’s origins, but not as drastically as Elliott and Rossio did. They changed the creature’s roots from dinosaur to iguana; an iguana mutated by the radioactivity of nuclear tests conducted by France in French Polynesia. As Devlin explained to Fangoria, “One of the things we wanted to do was not make this the twenty-third sequel to Godzilla. We wanted to start from the beginning. There are many things we pay homage to, but the idea of this was not to be nostalgic or kitschy, but rather to do Godzilla today the way the first Godzilla was intended to be.”
Just like in the original, 1954 film, the U.S. Godzilla’s presence is first revealed through its destruction of a Japanese fishing boat. The sole survivor claims the boat was destroyed by the mythological sea monster Gojira. The creature continues making its way across the globe, approaching the East Coast of the United States.
Emmerich and Devlin prided themselves on their characters. Viewers were wowed by the special effects in Independence Day, but the filmmakers were more proud of their ensemble cast, and they wanted to do something similar with Godzilla. They cast Matthew Broderick as the lead, Nick Tatopoulos of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a character named in honor of the creature designer. He’s one of the experts brought in by the military to try to figure out what’s going on and is the first to deduce that the creature they’re tracking is a “mutated aberration,” the result of radioactivity. This consulting gig takes him to rain-soaked New York City, home of his college girlfriend Audrey Timmonds, who ran out on him years ago. Maria Pitillo was cast as Audrey, who has been working as an assistant to a creep news reporter played by Harry Shearer, who is best known for his voice work on The Simpsons. Audrey hopes to become an on-air personality. Aided by cameraman Animal, played by Hank Azaria – also best known for his work on The Simpsons – she attempts to make the Godzilla situation her big break. Which causes some fresh drama between her and Nick.
Jean Reno lurks around as a man named Philippe Roaché, who is eventually revealed to be French Secret Service. He and his team have a major role in the climactic sequence, aiming to clean up the mess caused by their country’s nuclear tests. Also in the ensemble are Kevin Dunn as military colonel Hicks, Arabella Field as Audrey’s friend and Animal’s wife Lucy, Vicki Lewis as paleontologist Elsie Chapman, Malcolm Danare as chemist Mendel Craven, and Michael Lerner as the Mayor of New York City, Ebert, who is paired with Lorry Goldman as his aide Gene. These characters were Emmerich and Devlin’s way of thumbing their noses at movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel for giving their films negative reviews. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpson, shows up for a cameo.
There are a lot of characters, but they don’t slow down the monster action much. Godzilla makes landfall in New York just twenty-five minutes into the movie. Emmerich holds off on showing a full shot of him. There are only quick glimpses of body parts, and he is clearly massive. This version of Godzilla, brought to the screen through animatronics and CGI, is about two hundred feet tall and over three hundred feet long. So it’s taller than the original Godzilla, but smaller than the Godzilla of the ‘80s and ‘90s Toho movies. Forty-five minutes in, we get our first good look at the Patrick Tatopoulos design. It strayed too far from classic Godzilla for many, but Toho signed off on the changes, feeling the spirit of Godzilla was retained. The look is very different, but there are recognizable elements in there.
And when the military pisses the monster off, it demonstrates its fiery breath. Godzilla has always had the ability to blast things with his radioactive breath. This is another thing that was reworked by Emmerich and Devlin. As effects supervisor Volker Engel explained to Cinefex, “Dean and Roland wanted this monster to retain a certain menace and credibility, but Godzilla’s breath is something everyone expects to see. So they came up with instances in which you would see something like the old breath, but with a logic applied to it. We make the assumption that something in his breath, when it comes in contact with flame, causes combustive ignition. So you get this flame-thrower effect, which causes everything to ignite.”
Something else this Godzilla can do is reproduce asexually and lay eggs. He has come to Manhattan to nest. So we get multiple action sequences with the adult Godzilla – he smashes through the city, has encounters with the military, dodges helicopters, gets torpedoed by submarines, and takes part in a car chase that ends on the Brooklyn Bridge. We also get an action sequence involving the monster’s offspring, with more than two hundred eggs hatching inside Madison Square Garden. Nine foot tall babies emerge from the eggs… and they’ll all be able to reproduce just like Godzilla did.
Emmerich and Devlin took the concept of Godzilla and delivered a fun, dopey creature feature with a lighthearted tone and plenty of destructive entertainment. The problem is… the monster just isn’t Godzilla. The new design was kept hidden in the marketing, partly because the effects weren’t ready to be shown in trailers, so only parts of Godzilla were shown. There was a scene specifically shot for a teaser that shows Godzilla’s foot smashing a T. Rex skeleton in a museum, letting viewers know he’s much bigger than something we’d see in Jurassic Park. The tagline was “Size Does Matter.” But when viewers saw that this wasn’t a Godzilla they recognized, they were disappointed. The monster earned the nickname Gino, which stands for “Godzilla In Name Only.”
Godzilla 1998 was still a box office success, earning three hundred and seventy-nine million dollars worldwide. TriStar was ready to go ahead with a sequel. Tab Murphy, who works primarily in animation, wrote a treatment where the last surviving Godzilla offspring would be allowed to raise a family in the Australian Outback… until its peace is interrupted by a military task force and monstrous insects that were also the result of the French nuclear tests. This would all lead to a battle between Godzilla and the insect queen. But it didn’t get made. TriStar knew Godzilla’s reception had not been very enthusiastic. So they set aside their plans to make a trilogy and Toho quickly resumed their franchise, starting a new series of Godzilla movies in 1999.
There would be no live-action sequel for “Godzilla In Name Only” – but there was an animated series follow-up that ran for two seasons and followed Nick Tatopoulos, the Godzilla offspring, and several other characters from the film on adventures around the world. That was a good show; even people who dislike the ’98 movie will often praise the cartoon. And in 2004, for their fiftieth anniversary film Godzilla: Final Wars, Toho brought the American Godzilla back in live action. Giving the monster the name Zilla, they had him appear in their movie just long enough for him to be destroyed by the original Godzilla. Which many felt was a fitting end to his story.
Ten years later, Legendary Pictures launched their Monsterverse franchise with another American attempt at Godzilla… And that time, they made sure not to alter the character too much.
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Arrow in the Head
