Superhero Media: Godzilla (1998)

As an avid wargamer, comics fan, Kaiju fan, Smash Bros player and Wuxia fan, I'm familiar with the "colourful" nature of fan culture, especially as it exists online. One fandom that never seems to disappoint is the Japanese Godzilla fans and their community. Despite despising the 1998 American Godzilla, the film still gets folded into cannon and even resolved in the, far-superior, Godzilla: Final Wars. There's no two ways about it, Godzilla is pretty terrible, and for more than a few reasons, but there is something worth taking a look at here if you can wade through the shit. For example, the scenes where characters are chasing Zilla through New York and he keeps vanishing in the fog are really well done and evoke the right mood, also Jean Reno and his French Secret Service are the most compelling characters. The third act, where the French are getting killed off by the baby Zillas is a little disappointing with how they're set up in the first half of the film, but I have a soft spot for infantry versus "Kaiju Spawn" scenes. 

This take on Godzilla is quite dull, all-in, turning one of the most iconic movie monsters in history into yet another disaster film where Americans run away from falling debris. Unlike the 2014 Godzilla, the 1998 version makes no hints at the larger franchise or other monsters, we have to deal with Zilla battling helicopters and the aforementioned French soldiers versus spawn scene that seems ripped from The Lost World. The cool thing though? How this film follows into Final Wars. In Final Wars, two members of an expert panel on Godzilla inquire about "the American Godzilla", dismissing it as "They called it Godzilla, but it really wasn't"; the name 'Zilla' is the accepted one in the fandom, hence what I'm using in this piece. In Final Wars, Zilla turns up in Sydney, Australia, but is defeated by the real Godzilla in a matter of seconds, which is more than it deserved, really. 

As I tend to repeat, I find superhero films with nothing redeemable or interesting in them to be rare; so far only Green Lantern and Super Buddies fit the criteria. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of films that I watch that I never want to see again, Godzilla being one of them. That's part of why I mention the "good" parts of any of these bad films, so that I have them to hand on my blog rather than having to sit through them again. Say I felt like adding Zilla to my Kaiju games, I know that the best bit was the Kaiju Spawn versus soldiers, so I could get myself some 6-10mm raptors or t-rex to fight my 6mm Soviets and just cut to the fun part. I'm saying that I'm constantly thinking about superhero wargames, but by thinking about what elements of the media I'm consuming that may be of use down the track.