TriStar Godzilla Breakdown

TriStar Godzilla Breakdown

139 minutes or Length 2 hours 19 minutes 

Director         Roland Emmerich 

Writer            Roland Emmerich, Dean Devlin

Effects           Centropolis

Music            David Arnold

Godzilla Breakdown and Screen Time

Zilla

Total Time in Film                51:28

Total Screen Time                12:58

Tease Appearance                 5:22

New York (but no full shot) 25:31

Full Apperaance                   45:52

Baby Zilla’s

Total Time in Film      20:38

Total Scene Time          4:47

First Appearance     1:32:19

Act I         Mysterious events lead to New York City

Act II        Godzilla in New York

Act III       Babies and pissed off Godzilla 

Plot 5

Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin boasted that they wrote the screenplay for the movie over a weekend at a restore, and it shows.The plot is full of dipshits, that do dumb things. They are one dimensional characters for cheap laughs, and to make things simple for the audience. The only thing I like was Jean Reno and his French team, when they were on I was at least a little entertained. Of course like many action movies, they are well trained, with guns, but get eaten by the baby zillas. While the main characters some how survive worst situations, guess their baby zillas were already full. 

Directing 10

Roland Emmerich is a competent director, knowing how to set up a shot and film actors, so I can’t given him to low of a score. But I can’t give it to high a score since the film really doesn’t have any stand out scenes, a few clever shots at most. 

Effects 10

They wanted to make Centropolis rank up with ILM and hoped this movie would help do that. But the opposite happened. If Jurassic Park, 5 years earlier, was the high bar the film was trying to reach, they never came close. Even when released Godzilla didn’t impress many, and really hasn’t aged well at all, now looking like something you would see on direct to video or sci-fi movie of the week. 

Music 10

Really a lackluster score and way to many band tie ins. Pretty much the worst musical score for a Godzilla movie, only a little better then early American releases that used stock music in place of the Japanese scores. 

Total 35

Full Discloser 

I saw this once in the theaters in 1998, Sunday morning matinee so I would pay the least amount of money. From what I heard in advance it was going to be horrible, and it was. I mainly saw it to see if what everyone was saying was true, and be able to talk about it if asked. I have avoided watching it again in it’s entirety as much as possible, and skipped it during my initial screen time project. I kept meaning to post it on April 1st at some point, but always had something better to do. But since I finished timing Shin Godzilla, I figured I should add it before redoing all my charts. 

This review was done with the Amazon Prime rental of “Godzilla”, because I don’t want to own it. The times maybe off a second plus or minus, I used the time code on the screen to check the time at any visual part of a godzilla on screen, full body, tail, foot, fin, head, etc… It maybe off by a few seconds but should be fairly accurate. If anyone else wishes to check their accuracy I would like to compare figures.