Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla: Here’s Everything Wrong With It In Seven Minutes

By Nick Venable | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

If you took the absolute worst Japanese Godzilla movie ever created, replaced the giant lizard monster with a big can of shaving cream, and turned the entire cast into a bunch of stop-motion origami swans, you would then have a movie that makes four times as much sense as Roland Emmerich’s completely misguided 1998 remake. Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you have to remember that it was the film whose soundtrack featured Puff Daddy and Jimmy Page’s awe-crippling remake of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” (Though it did feature the superb Rage Against the Machine song “No Shelter,” but that’s hardly justification.)

I don’t know how it took this long, but CinemaSins finally brought their fun-filled brand of sarcasm to what is probably the worst film of director Roland Emmerich’s mainstream career. Okay, okay. That was definitely 10,000 B.C., but at least that film sucked because there wasn’t much of a screenplay. Godzilla sucked because its screenplay was so very obvious from the word “go.”

It’s been ages since I watched this film in its entirety, and I sincerely forgot just how utterly insane it is. Wait, not insane. Inane. Spelling flub. Granted, it’s a fun film to watch, just to witness the myriad disasters that Emmerich and co-writer Dean Devlin’s screenplay puts forth, but it’s nowhere near as fun as the duo’s other films, including the equally ridiculous Independence Day and the non-ridiculous Stargate.

So what do they pick apart? What don’t they pick apart? A relative shit-ton of film clichés, including the “Oh, I’m listening to headphones, or my back is turned and so I don’t realize that the Earth is shaking because of a giant monster walking the streets.” There’s the terrible New York geography, the strange amount of destruction that Godzilla actually imparts upon the city, and the insistence on foreign characters speaking in English, only for the sake of the audience. Does shooting Godzilla work? No? Let’s just keep doing it then, and keep trying to use heat-seeking weapons against him, despite the fact that he’s very cold for whatever reason.

Two words: pregnancy test.

But I don’t need to just list everything you’ve just seen, and not just because reliving the movie irks me to my core. (Baby Godzillas! BABY GODZILLAS!)

If this video doesn’t fulfill your Godzilla trash talking quota for the day, check out this amazing episode of the podcast How Did This Get Made embedded below. This installment features Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, June Diane Raphael, and special guest Chris Gore from Attack of the Show, tearing apart the movie for nearly an hour. It’s so much more fun to think about Godzilla when you don’t actually have to watch any of it.

And because fuck it all, we’re already so far gone, here’s that Puff Daddy video.