Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Godzilla
1998 · Roland Emmerich · Godzilla on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how much of the film takes place in rain and darkness. (light)
Ueli Steiger keeps the palette desaturated and nocturnal. Neon and sodium light bleed across wet asphalt, and Manhattan becomes a maze of downpour where a very large animal can disappear between blocks.
Payoff: The weather is a concealment device. It buys suspense and it costs you the clear, full-figure spectacle the poster promised.
Watch how often you see only part of the creature. (camera)
A foot on a trawler, a tail through rain, a shape crossing between buildings. Steiger shoots from ground level and low angles so scale registers through foreground destruction rather than through a clean look at the animal.
Payoff: The monster keeps being in the next street rather than beyond reach, so the hiding relocates it instead of enlarging it. In the reading: out-of-field-relative. The reading calls this a relative out-of-field: the unseen thing is merely in the adjacent space you could walk into, not a dread without coordinates.
Listen for the footfalls telling you where the monster is. (sound)
The sound design carries the creature in scenes that barely show it. Low-end impacts, structural collapse, the roar. You are tracking it by ear for long stretches of the running time.
Payoff: Presence is delivered through the speakers rather than the screen, which is the compromise the rain forced on the film.
Count the chases and how quickly each one starts. (cutting)
The picture is built as a string of pursuits. The creature through Manhattan, the military after the creature, the run through bridges and tunnels. Nothing is allowed to sit still long enough to build dread.
Payoff: Emmerich cuts for propulsion. Every shot is a measure of the next move rather than a moment to look at anything.
Watch Reno complain about American coffee. (performance)
Jean Reno's French operative supplies the wit while Matthew Broderick plays his worm scientist affable and deflating. The casting leans on comic and character actors all the way down the bill.
Payoff: The performances tell you the register before the monster does. This is pitched light, not solemn.
Once you have seen it
Watch the Madison Square Garden sequence as a hunt. (structure)
The film pivots from one animal to dozens of eggs in a flooded arena, and the cutting there is the most controlled in the picture. It is Aliens transposed, a chase that opens into a hatchery.
Payoff: The real threat was never size. It was breeding, which is a late-century fear the blockbuster had already learned to sell. In the reading: originary-world. The reading calls the nest an originary world: a substrate of raw appetite and reproduction showing through the ordinary world of experts and press conferences.
Compare this creature's shape to Toho's rubber-suit silhouette. (setting)
Patrick Tatopoulos was given license to discard the original outline entirely. What he built is lean, fast, burrowing and fertile, much closer to the raptors of Jurassic Park than to anything Toho made.
Payoff: Toho's monster carried the atomic dead. This one carries hunger. Trading one for the other is the whole objection fans never quite named. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the 1954 creature a symbol: an object condensing a film's organizing idea, which the redesign swaps out for a pure drive.
Watch the mayor and his aide and who they resemble. (performance)
Mayor Ebert and his assistant Gene are unmistakable caricatures of the two critics who had panned Emmerich and Devlin before. The film folds a complaint about its own reception into the text.
Payoff: It is the only moment the picture thinks about itself instead of simply moving forward.
Listen for the brass swelling as if this were Independence Day. (sound)
David Arnold writes in the same heroic-disaster idiom he built on Stargate and Independence Day. Around it sits a marketing layer of pop tie-ins, including Puff Daddy reworking Kashmir.
Payoff: The score treats the event as a national emergency picture. The property it is attached to was built on mourning instead.
Carry this in: Watch what the rain hides. Emmerich sold size and then spent two hours keeping the creature out of full view.