Why Can't America Do Godzilla Right?

After watching the most recent western Godzilla adaption I started to wonder why the west can't seem to make a good Godzilla movie. The latest Japanese Godzilla, Shin Godzilla directed by Hideaki Anno best know for creating the popular Japanese anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, was a near perfect Godzilla film, which seems to be not a lot of Godzilla in it.

For some reason when the American's make a Godzilla movie they can't help but have him in almost every shot, Shin Godzilla kept the monster to a minimum which made it all the more cool to see him smashing through Japan. This is something the Americans are yet to learn, repetitive destruction can get boring.

Shin Godzilla kept the monster to a minimum which made it all the more cool to see him smashing through Japan

Maybe its because Anno has experience in this field, seeing has how Evangelion was also all about giant things smashing through a city, whereas the western 2014 Godzilla film was directed by Gareth Edwards who's only other feature film at the time was a slow paced horror film called Monsters, so what if someone who had experience making huge bombastic and destructive films had a crack at Godzilla, oh wait someone did.

Remember Independence Day, that film where aliens invaded and president Bill Pullman fought them off, remember how stupid that was? Well the director of that went on to make a Godzilla film, I'll give you three guesses to see if you can work out what it was like.

OK done guessing? If you guessed that it was a flaming rubbish fire of a film then congratulations.

Yes the infamous 1998 Roland Emmerich directed Godzilla was a disaster film in more ways than one, from terrible acting to awful effects, to weird Jurassic Park homages, to Matthew Brodrick's legendarily stupid line "That's a lot of fish" this film is the cinematic equivalent of the saying "Just because you can doesn't mean you should" Emmerich and his partner in crime, screenwriter Dean Devlin made just about every mistake they could on this film, from the nonsensical script to committing a sin of the highest order and redesigning Godzilla. Yes gone was that iconic bulky figure and in came an overgrown T Rex with Jay Leno's chin.

But this film was a success, even though people hated it and reviews slated it people still went to see it. That's because of the trailer, it barely showed anything of Godzilla you might see a hand or foot but nothing else, if you wanted to see the whole monster you had to watch the movie.

That's because of the trailer, it barely showed anything of Godzilla you might see a hand or foot but nothing else, if you wanted to see the whole monster you had to watch the movie.

This was a trick that Emmerich had employed before, the trailer for the aforementioned Independence Day just showed clips of the white house being blown up, then the title card, if you wanted to know why the white house was blowing up you had to watch the movie.

So Godzilla 1998 was bad and the 2014 version had the right idea of keeping the monster back more but failed on execution as it shoved two original new monsters down our throats for the rest of the film.

Well now lets take a look at a Japanese Godzilla and see what makes it better than an American Godzilla.

I've already mentioned 2016's Shin Godzilla in this post before so it makes sense to look at that, in Shin Godzilla the monster just shows up one day in Tokyo Bay, alright America's versions just randomly show up too, the next scenes of Shin Godzilla see the Japanese government arguing about what to do with the thing in the bay. This goes on for about ten minutes with no Godzilla, I mean its tail sticks out the water in some news reel footage but other than that no Godzilla. It still takes a good few scenes of government procedure until the monster comes out of the bay and starts destroying things, but this is a short rampage and we're soon back to watching the prime minister and his lackeys argue about what to do. The key takeaway of Shin Godzilla would be that the human character are just as important as Godzilla, sure he might be on the DVD cover but we need good well written human characters on the ground so we get an idea of the destructive nature of Godzilla. In Shin Godzilla the destruction has an impact, we see subway tunnels filled with now homeless people, it makes the devastation feel real. An American Godzilla film doesn't have this, they lack this grounded realism, Godzilla doesn't feel like a giant monster and the city doesn't feel real either without a connection to people on the ground we might as well just be watching a cat in a Godzilla costume ruining a rather expensive Lego project.