A Sony Pictures Release of a TriStar Pictures Presentation of a Toho Pictures Production; Executive produced by Shogo Tomiyama; Produced by Toshihiro Ogawa; Written by Hiroshi Kashiwabara and Wataru Mimura; Directed by Takao Okawara
Opens August 18, 2000
Milking his genres, director Roland Emmerich made one movie about aliens invading the earth and yet another about a nasty critter named Godzilla. At Toho Films in Japan, they're a bit more practical. They decided that they needed only one movie to tell both stories, and they offer it up in Godzilla 2000.
Yes, Godzilllaaaaaa! is once again the rallying cry across the land. That big green lizard with the bad attitude -- and his evil nemesis, here a 6,000 year old alien with a hankering for earth -- will soon be terrorizing Japan in a theater near you. With this story, Toho has basically abandoned every Godzilla movie of the past, except for the first one, and started over. Frankly, it doesn't really matter because after the original in 1954, which embraced its story with the moralistic fervor of the time, the films got progressively sillier. Godzilla 2000 is most certainly good for more than a few laughs.
One of the first images you see in the film is a research van over which a super title appears: Godzilla Prediction Network, Mobile Unit. This might not seem funny on the surface, but when you see it on the screen, it's a riot. Along with moments like this, the best part of this film is the typically atrocious dubbing and translation, which often evokes gales of laughter. Bite me and That damn teriyaki is cold are stand-outs. It wouldn't be so much fun either if the actors didn't take themselves so seriously. But they do and the melodrama that ensues is, as always, vastly amusing.
Now Godzilla movies have never had a reputation for being action-packed extravaganzas. Let's face it, the big guy crushes some buildings, knocks around another monster with his stubby claws and, if you're lucky, spews forth his radioactive fire breath. It's always been cult camp and here, it's much of the same. One day, just for the heck of it, Godzilla steps out of the ocean and decides to have a little fun, stomping across a helpless Japanese town. Godzilla's arrival inspires a brief period of character conflict between the hero GPN Director Shinoda (Takehiro Murata) and the antagonist CCI Chief Katagiri (Hiroshi Abe), former chums who parted ways when the good guy decided that Godzilla needed to be studied and the bad guy decided he needed to be destroyed. (FYI, easy-on-the-eyes Abe is one of the high points of the film with his poster boy swagger and ridiculous baritone-dubbed voice.)
Meanwhile, power-hungry scientists have discovered a huge meteorite in the ocean that turns out to be an alien spacecraft. This is one of the cooler sequences in the film as the muddy rock they uncover levitates and transforms into a funky blue space ship thanks to the wonders of solar energy (and CGI.) The ship is, of course, impervious to the military's best weapons. You can see where this is headed, right? Godzilla and bad boy alien duke it, laying waste to the city and each other. Guess who wins?
And, that's all folks. The story line, which pays some vague lip service to the evil alien terra-forming the earth, is mildly inventive, but never really goes anywhere. At times, it even gets take-a-nap boring: Indeed, after twenty minutes of the alien ship resting atop a high rise, you start to fidget and wonder when the hell this thing is going to do something. And when Godzilla and the alien finally fight, well, it's just a big rumble. But then, when has a Godzilla battle ever been that dynamic.
Toho has tried to bring their biggest franchise into the 21st century, but when it comes down to it -- even with more modern special effects to juice things up -- Godzilla is still just some guy (stuntman Tsutomu Kitagawa, in th