Monster Mash

The "Size Matters" marketing campaign for Godzilla is far more ingenious than the movie. It's also highly annoying -- and somewhat misleading. After all, as the ads for a new film called Plump Fiction remind us, "Width matters, too." Perhaps the best thing about this week's ballyhooed arrival of Godzilla is that its marketing blitz will soon fritz. One hopes.

And what about the movie? Like most disaster/monster summer fare, the film itself is a species of marketing. It's all sell. And what it's selling -- a bigger and better Godzilla -- is essentially a jumbo variation on the raptors in Spielberg's Jurassic Park and The Lost World. This makes perfect sense. Director and co-screenwriter Roland Emmerich and screenwriter/producer Dean Devlin -- the team responsible for Stargate and Independence Day -- have made a fortune turning out sub-Spielbergian schlock.

They make grand-scale entertainment, but their imaginations are essentially keyed to the television generation -- which may explain why their films are so popular. They do it up big, but their frame of reference -- mostly old sci-fi movies and TV shows -- is pint-sized. The marketeers over at Sony Pictures got it right, although not in the way they intended: Size does matter -- the size of one's imagination, that is.

It seems that after 44 years and 22 movies, Godzilla still walks among us. Giant footprints turn up in places like Papeete, Tahiti, and the beaches of Jamaica; Japanese tuna-fishing boats get gulped. Until this point, we've been subjected to the usual monster-movie striptease -- a flash of tail here, a leg there. When Godzilla decides to make it in Manhattan, we're finally treated to a fuller view -- and he's impressive. He almost makes us forget the rinky-dink dramaturgy, with Matthew Broderick playing a golly-gee biologist for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who says things like, "We're looking at the dawn of a new species." No, bud, we're just looking at a summer movie.

Emmerich and Devlin had such a high old time junking New York in Independence Day that they probably couldn't resist doing it again. Godzilla decapitates the Chrysler Building, stuffs his head in the Park Avenue tunnel, snarls up in the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. Shot mostly in a nighttime fog, these scenes are spectacular. (The monster was designed by Patrick Tatopoulos.) If you've ever wanted to see the city really clobbered, look no further -- although the filmmakers don't seem to realize that New York even without a Godzilla attack looks pretty torn up.

Emmerich and Devlin don't play up the kitsch inherent in making a big, expensive Godzilla movie. The 22 Godzilla flicks in the creature's 44-year filmography were cheeseball affairs -- that's what was fun about them. The monsters were mostly played by a Japanese guy in a rubberoid suit. The current Godzilla is a computer-generated behemoth, and scary as he often is, I miss the rubber man. There's something a bit misguided about making a Godzilla movie with all this reverence for the genre. Maybe the filmmakers don't want to spoil their chances for a Godzilla franchise by getting too funky.

But, as a result, Godzilla himself doesn't have much personality. And monsters can have personality -- just think of King Kong. In this new film, it's not even clear just how smart Godzilla is. The raptors in the Spielberg movies were demonically clever, but Godzilla here is a bit of a lummox. The only reason he sticks around for as long as he does is because the humans arrayed against him are even stupider.

The cast, besides Broderick, is motley and middling. Hank Azaria plays a gonzo TV cameraman for one of the local stations, and spends a lot of time almost getting crushed. Jean Reno, one of France's biggest stars, turns up as a Gallic secret-service honcho trying to get the goods on Godzilla. (It's some sort of payback for his country's nuclear testing in French Polynesia -- don't ask.) For some in-joke reason, Michael Lerner, playing the mayor of New York, is named Ebert, and he's even made up to look like Rog. This could turn out to be a new development in marketeering -- plug the critic, get a rave. Of course, the filmmakers haven't dispensed with the standard plugola. Prominently displayed logos for Blockbuster Video, and many other companies, mysteriously survive the monster's rampages. And perhaps that's the great lesson to be learned from Godzilla. Monsters may come and go, cities may crumble, but product placement is forever.

Godzilla.
Rated PG-13.
Directed by Roland Emmerich. WIth Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Hank Azaria and Maria Pitillo.