Another Kaiju Appreciation update, this one for Zilla, the unfortunate kaiju from the Roland Emmerich / Dean Devlin film from 1998. Enjoy!

G-98 may be the textbook example of how not to make an adaptation. They hit just about every possible mistake you could make with that one. Such as:

-Have contempt for the material. Emmerich and Devlin openly admitted they didn’t like the Godzilla films and didn’t understand what people found appealing about them. They only accepted the role because the studio threw huge amounts of money at them and promised they could do more or less whatever they wanted (ignoring the fact that Toho had provided them a number of strict guidelines for using the character).

-Change things for no reason and / or to make them worse. Zilla very obviously bears no resemblance to Godzilla at all. It would be as if the next James Bond film envisioned Bond as a Black Canadian woman who works in accounting and is dragged into the spy game, only to end up getting killed (and I wish I could believe the current Broccoli clan weren’t hoping to do exactly that). Gone is the indomitable will, the functional invulnerability, the flashes of near-humanity. Gone even is the atomic ray (the studio panicked after that deletion leaked and hastily cg’d some flames over Zilla’s roar in a few scenes). Instead, we have a female(!) mutant iguana who chows down on fish and lays hundreds of eggs that hatch into not-raptors, and who only survives her encounters with the military by running away and hiding (Because apparently, the US Military has no way of tracking down a two-hundred-foot lizard in Manhattan once she gets out of their line of sight. I mean, for goodness sakes, get a dog if you can’t think of anything else!)

By the way, despite her laying eggs, the script still refers to Zilla as male for some odd reason. Maybe this film was more ahead of its time than I thought.

Not only is this different, but it’s all so stupid and lame. Take the element that she hungers for fish, for instance: what about that makes the monster at all impressive? How is the audience supposed to take that? How does that do anything except for raise questions of what she’s even doing hunting for fish in New York City? A city she traveled through two oceans (oceans with fish in them) to get to? Likewise, how does her running away and using hit-and-run tactics do anything to raise the stakes? It just tells us that her defeat is only a matter of time, until the military gets one good shot off on her (contrast with Independence Day, where the alien ships were invulnerable for most of the movie and even when they were open to attack, were too massive to bring down easily).

About all they did keep was the name, the roar (it’s a stock sound effect at this point), and the nuclear angle, though the latter pretty much serves solely as an origin story and doesn’t come into play at all otherwise.

-And finally, make a film that’s terrible on its own merits. Even apart from the shadow of Godzilla, this is an awful movie; overlong, horribly paced (that baby-zilla sequence goes on forever), horribly written, and horribly acted by mostly-poor or miscast performers who have no idea what to do with themselves (this was a brief, bizarre period where Matthew Broderick tried to be an action star, and man, he cannot pull it off).

No one seems to treat the giant monster as a serious threat or to act as if they’re living through a major disaster with apocalyptic implications: at best it seems like a mild inconvenience, like a city-wide blackout. Zilla does less damage to New York than the military does by constantly firing at her and missing (though this is at least pointed out).

Then there are the odd cameos (like half the cast of The Simpsons) and petty grudges, like how the incompetent mayor and his sycophantic aide are caricatures of Siskel and Ebert, the film critics (The best part about that was that Ebert’s only reaction was to express disappointment that they didn’t even have the guts to kill him off), and just the strangely flippant and carefree tone throughout, where it isn’t a comedy, but no one seems to be really taking anything seriously.

And Zilla herself, frankly, is a pretty terrible design. She’s, well, ugly: her head is too big, her body and legs are too narrow, and the whole design is so busy that to this day it’s hard to get a grasp on what are even the key elements of her design (you could never do a caricature of her, for instance). Given that she’s almost exclusively seen at night and in the rain, it’s hard to even tell what color she’s supposed to be.

And all this supposedly coming off of one of the sleekest, most impressive, most iconic creature designs ever put to film. You can describe Godzilla in a couple words (a tyrannosaurus with the plates of a stegosaurus) and immediately grasp not only how he’s supposed to look, but also that it’s going to be a very striking image. You can also tweak that design in a hundred different ways without getting away from the essentials. Zilla, on the other hand…I have no idea what they were thinking.

Overall, this is a film where the adage “They just didn’t care” applies with a vengeance.

Okay, so what about my video?

Well, this was one of my first ones, and I hit on You Oughta Know by Alanis Morissette on a suggestion from a friend. The bitterness of the song, I thought, fit with how ill-served Zilla was by the film and how she’s subsequently been thrown upon the ash heap of cinematic history. In my head, I picture her singing it to Emmerich, complaining about how his disinterest left her as a painful footnote to the series when, with a little more effort, she could have been a strong addition to it (and I will say that I am glad that she’s become part of the Toho stable with her appearance in Final Wars, which seems to have somewhat softened fans’ attitudes toward her).

Honestly, if I were doing the series over, I probably would have chosen something different, since this song’s very out of step with the rest of the videos. Though, on the other hand, it might be fitting that it should be so for her, given her place among the kaiju.

I’m actually pretty well satisfied with the original video, so I didn’t change much; just tried to tighten up the editing and to add some more footage to given it more dynamism. I especially tried to add more from the underwater sequence, which is one of the better parts of the film, but which was too dark to really use with my old program.

Here’s the original for comparison (note that I called her ‘Jira’ here; the Japanese name. I thought it sounded more dignified, but it ended up only confusing people).