Board Thread:Movie Discussions/@comment-24868748-20140518055647/@comment-25285745-20150822200928

Lady Blue wrote: In all honestly, I don't see how it's a rip-off of any of the Jurassic Park movies. People say the young Godzillas are like the velociraptors, but I don't see it.

"I still say it would be a decent monster movie if not for it bearing the title GODZILLA." A title shouldn't affect how good a movie is regardless of what it's about, though.

I've never really noticed any big flaws in 1998 Godzilla. (I notice more in the Japanese movies, to be honest.) And since you mentioned when you were young, I actually enjoy 1998 Godzilla even more as an adult than I did as a kid. The Japanese movies, however...most of them bore me. (Exceptions would be vs Gigan, vs Destoyorah, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, vs Ghidorah, and GMK. Note that I haven't seen them all yet since I haven't had time lately to watch more than the 10 or so Godzilla movies I've seen so far.) You seriously don't see the Jurassic Park similarities? Zilla's design closely reflects a tyrannosaurus or velociraptor rather than Godzilla, though this alone doesn't mean much. Several of the scenes featuring Zilla are incredibly reminiscent of the T-Rex scenes from Jurassic Park and The Lost World, especially the sequence near the end where Zilla chases a cab, which is almost perfectly lifted from the scene in the first JP film where the T-Rex chases the Jeep, albeit on a bigger scale. The Baby Zilla scenes are the most blatant. There are several sequences that are identical to the raptor stalking scenes from the original Jurassic Park.

A title can affect how good a movie is if the movie is pretending to be something it isn't. Imagine if a movie was called Superman, but instead of Superman, the movie is about a man with no powers who somehow becomes pregnant, runs away from criminals, and gets shot and killed at the end. Even if the movie was good, it would inevitably be disliked because it's an insult to Superman with no connection to the source material. That is what the 1998 film was for Godzilla.

1998 has several major flaws. The acting is pretty poor across the board, except in the cases of Jean Reno and Kevin Dunn, who both do a solid job. The film's pacing really hurts it, the dialogue is very poorly-written in several scenes, the effects go from being excellent to bad even for their time, scenes are lifted from the Jurassic Park films, and last but not least, the film is a blatant insult to Godzilla. If you can't see at least some of these flaws to an extent, you're deluding yourself.

If you don't like the Japanese films, that's fine. But keep in mind that those are the actual Godzilla films. 1998 really doesn't count as a Godzilla film, because it has nothing in common except name. It's like the Super Mario Bros. movie or Dragonball Evolution, it's an extremely loose American film adaptation of a Japanese source material that was despised by fans and critics. It's not a bad giant monster movie, but it is a pale attempt at a Godzilla movie, and even that is being generous since Roland Emmerich went out of his way to avoid any similarity to the Japanese films at all.

The quality of a film is of course really just a matter of personal preference, however it is an objective fact that 1998 is not a good Godzilla movie, and that its universal reception was overwhelmingly negative and still is today.