a review of

I generally stay away from American Godzilla movies but this won the watchalong poll. I remembered the ad campaigns from this and tried to hype myself up watching a 20 minute compilation of commercials, trailers, and tie-ins. So many toys, tacos, special promotional flashlights, all kinds of crap. They really overhyped this film. The "jokes" about the Siskel and Ebert lookalikes are unfunny and just emphasize how sour the director is feeling about a bad review. I think we're supposed to be in on the joke but it's not a good one and backfires because this movie is not good. It's trying really hard to capture the excitement of other 90s blockbusters like Jurassic Park etc but it doesn't earn anything it's doing, it's hard to care about any of the characters, and the spectacle of it escalates beyond 11 for such a long time that it just feels ho-hum. There is no calm to give anything scale. I fell asleep on the couch. We watch a lot of shorter B movies in this watchalong and this is like the length of two and a half Roger Corman runtimes. It's a slog. Maybe would have been cool to watch this when it opened at Madison Square Garden with all the licensed snacks and drinks, who knows? But it has not aged well and I feel I spent my 1998 wisely watching Spice World over and over instead.