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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what the rain hides. Emmerich sold size and then spent two hours keeping the creature out of full view.