The “shoddy” movie Roger Ebert compared to a satanic ritual: “A big, ungainly device”
Sometimes, a movie is so bad that you can’t help but feel offended by its very existence.
You find yourself disgusted by the fact that a film so terrible, so lazily executed, was conjured up by someone and subsequently funded by a studio, only to end up on a screen in front of you.
Roger Ebert, whose career as a film critic began in the 1960s and continued until his death in 2013 –making him one of America’s most prominent critical voices – watched a lot of shit during his time, sitting down to watch everything from the new Stanley Kubrick movie to the latest Fast and Furious instalment, watching everything in the name of cinema, which unsurprisingly led him to some pretty offensive excuses for filmmaking.
During his time at the Cannes Film Festival in 1998, he of course found himself in the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, the main building that the prestigious event calls home, but it was here that Ebert was subjected to a film so awful that he felt as though he was committing an act of movie-going sin, watching something so bad in a place of such cinematic grandeur.
“Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s a rebuke to the faith that the building represents,” he wrote in his review of the Roland Emmerich-directed movie. Calling it “a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie,” Ebert decried this lazy excuse for cinema, shot primarily at night to hide just how “shoddy” the special effects were.
“Steven Spielberg opened Jurassic Park by giving us a good, long look at the dinosaurs in full sunlight, and our imaginations leapt up. Godzilla hops out of sight like a camera-shy kangaroo,” Ebert wrote. When a movie like Jurassic Park comes along, it’s easy to see why it becomes so popular. Pulling out all the stops, with an unforgettable score and innovative special effects, Jurassic Park gets the sci-fi adventure genre just right – and the proof is in its enduring popularity all these years later.
Godzilla, on the other hand, came as a poorly-made cash-grab, hoping to hop on the trend and carry on the pre-existing source material’s legacy. But it just didn’t work. There are no truly memorable characters or emotional stakes. Ebert added, “One must carefully repress intelligent thought while watching such a film. The movie makes no sense at all except as a careless pastiche of its betters.”
While the movie wasn’t exactly adored by critics, Godzilla somehow became incredibly popular at the box office. I guess people can’t get enough of a big monster movie that revels in blockbuster action, but I’m sure many viewers soon realised that they were sitting in front of a movie that was all bark and no bite. You need more than a huge creature to create a monster movie that actually leaves an impact.
Ebert summed up his review with some pretty telling descriptors – “cold-hearted, “mechanistic,” “sterile” – suggesting that the film was “so starved for emotion or wit.” Clearly, he found the older Godzilla movies much more worthwhile.
