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 fter Tri-Star’s "Godzilla"
gobbled like a turkey instead of roared, Toho Pictures was quick to return their
creation to the big screen. The first film in the "Millennium"
Godzilla series ignores all the previous entries that came before it and starts
over with a fresh continuity for the filmmakers to work with. The result is a
film with some very imaginative ideas that never achieves its full potential.
"Godzilla 2000 Millennium" starts off with a
bang, as Godzilla pays a nighttime visit to Japan and destroys a power plant.
Pursuing Godzilla is the Godzilla Prediction Network; essentially the storm
chasers of the monster field, they want to study Godzilla to predict when and
where he will appear. Meanwhile, an ancient meteor is discovered in the ocean
depths off Japan. The meteor is revealed to be an alien spacecraft that crashed
to Earth 60 million years ago. Inside the meteor is an extraterrestrial entity
that wants to destroy Godzilla and use his cellular structure to create a new
body for itself. Once in its new physical form, it will radically alter the
Earth’s environment to make it more like its home planet. Godzilla squares off
against this alien menace, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.
The first half hour of "Godzilla 2000 Millennium"
gives Godzilla plenty of screen time, exactly what the audience came to see.
Whether he’s fighting the military or the alien craft, Godzilla is a lot of
fun to watch -- definitely an actor with terrific on-screen charisma. Godzilla
has also been given a makeover, looking sleeker with long, spiky back fins. His
trademark fire breath has also been spruced up; his back fins crackle and glow
before fire explodes from his mouth. This is the best Godzilla has looked since
his 1954 debut.
But without Godzilla, the film dramatically slows and
becomes a lot less interesting. A subplot involving the discovery of
Godzilla’s regenerative abilities is nothing any fan doesn’t know, and bogs
the film down unnecessarily. The idea of Godzilla being attracted to man made
power sources is brought up, and then largely ignored. The main villain of the
film, the alien, never has any direct communication with the human characters.
It would have made the film a lot more interesting if we were able to learn more
about what the alien was and where it came from, or what it plans were once it
has taken over the Earth. Instead, it just flies around in its spacecraft and
hacks into Tokyo’s computers, completely devoid of any personality that would
have livened up the film when Godzilla was off-screen.
The human players are basically one-dimensional cardboard
characters. There’s the scientist father and his precocious daughter, a whiny
female reporter, and the ruthless head of the Japanese defense forces. Although
the actors and actresses give good performances, their characters are not
realized enough to be particularly memorable. Their scenes seem to be there to
pad the film in between Godzilla’s appearances.
The special effects, a vital part of a film like this, are
particularly well done. The new Godzilla suit seems to be less constricting, and
gives the actor inside more maneuverability in the battle scenes. The miniature
work is impressive and quite detailed. A good job is also done in melding the
special effects to the live action footage, making the battle scenes very
realistic. However, the computer-generated effects leave a lot of room for
improvement. While depictions of aircraft and tanks look pretty good, a more
complicated sequence of Godzilla swimming underwater looks cartoonish. Most
impressive is the film’s closing shot, with Godzilla surrounded by an inferno
in downtown Tokyo.
This is a good Godzilla film, one that will satisfy his
legion of fans. But you can’t help watching it and not notice room for
improvement. There is plenty of Godzilla action, but the film drags when its
main star is off-screen. Hopefully in the future filmmakers will work on making
subsequent movies as exciting when Godzilla is off-screen as when he's on. Then
Godzilla films can stop being just good, and be as great as they have the
potential to be.
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