Wake Up Godzilla!
Why is it I can go to the video store and rent a new Steven
Seagal movie every other month while the powers that be decided it would be a
good idea to shelf Godzilla, a giant radioactive lizard who’s been known to eat
trains, breath fire, fly, and scrap with King Kong? Godzilla would totally kick
Seagal’s ass. There used to be a time when I couldn’t keep up with the amount of
giant monster movies coming out of Japan. There was a new boxed set every time I
went to Best Buy. Sweatshops opened weekly to meet the demand of rubber suits.
You could watch him kick Rodan’s ass on any given Saturday morning, fire through
a couple epic battles with Ghidorah after lunch, and then get high and head out
to your local drive-in and laugh your ass off at Baby Godzilla’s smoke rings.
Those days are gone.
After GODZILLA: FINAL WARS confused me for the better part of
two hours and left me with a bitter taste in my mouth I was told the big bitch
was going away for at least ten years. His scheduled return wasn’t until 2013.
Around 2007 we were told Yoshimitsu Banno (the director of GODZILLA VS. HEDORAH)
had set the clock ahead and promised us GODZILLA 3D, a brand new adventure set
to take place at Iguassu Falls and wind up on the streets of Las Vegas. That was
two years ago and there still isn’t a single word about the project other than
this sketchy poster below. It seems the project started out as an IMAX film in
2003 called GODZILLA VS. DEATHLA TO THE MAX, which was nothing more than a
strange 36 minute version of GODZILLA VS. HEDORAH. By 2005 Banno revised the
treatment and called it GODZILLA 3D TO THE MAX. The film was being designed by
Syd Mead (BLADE RUNNER, TRON, ALIENS) and was to be developed by a crew from
Japan and America who had plenty of experience with the IMAX format. By 2007 the
film, now simply called GODZILLA 3-D, was set in motion and given a February
2008 release date. I don’t remember seeing it. You can read all about this
history
right here, including detailed plot summaries of all three versions.
I can’t help but feel that the time is now for his return. The
interest shown in CLOVERFIELD a couple years ago proved there’s still an
audience for monster madness, and the onslaught of 3D films in the foreseeable
future is just begging the big bastard to join the trend. Not that I care if
it’s in 3D or not but imagine seeing those scales on his back light up, ready
for an epic blast, in the 3rd dimension on an IMAX screen. It’s fucking criminal
to tease us with kind of shit. Will it be cheesy? Hell yes! What Godzilla movie
isn’t? Nobody buys a ticket to see a three headed dragon, a oversized moth, and
a monster made of smog do battle with a big lizard and expects any screenplay
nominations in February.
Maybe it’s the booze talking but I feel the world needs a giant
monster to kick it’s ass every so often just to keep us on our toes. I’ll even
let the Americans give it a go again, after they punished me with one of the
most disappointing efforts in modern cinema (you can read more about that
right here). Godzilla’s
not dead people, he’s sleeping, and when he wakes up someone is going to pay for
unplugging his alarm clock. I’m looking directly at you Tokyo. Crazy bastards.