Disaster – Monsters Inc!

There’re a couple of rules when it comes to Monster movies.

#1: The critters have to be big – like massive.

#2: There have to be a couple of scenes where the critter goes about stomping around in an urban city with lots of civilians running and screaming in fear. What’s the fun if the ten storey monster stomps around in a forest?

#3: There has to be scenes where the human military fight back with all their Apache helicopters, Stealth Bombers, Abrahms tanks.

#4: Those efforts must be futile and serve merely as more fodder for the monster to squash LOL.

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With those rules in mind, we’ve got Godzilla (1998) first. I imagine film director Emmerich was inspired after ID4’s runaway success, so he went solo and took one of the most beloved Japanese monsters. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop at just turning New York into Godzilla’s newest stomping grounds – he made substantial changes to the critter, upsetting a lot of loyal fans of the Japanese series of films in the process. In Godzilla, the critter isn’t a huge lumbering monster. It’s more lizard like, swims like a fish, and almost agile.

Then there were the awful human roles. So Ok, humans in these movies are just intended to be supporting characters to the real attraction i.e. the Monster. But the film boasted of star talent like Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno who’ve proved in other films they’ve got acting chops. But the dialog and parts for both in Godzilla were so poorly written you’d forgive both for not including this film in their CVs.

Was the wanton destruction any good though? Well, the early scenes of Godzilla surfacing near the Eastern Seaboard and then marching through the streets of New York are a hoot. But as soon as the scenes where the military come in and try to stop the critter, the CG work goes digging down hill all the way to China. Heck. Some of the CG work looked absolutely fake.

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There was also two recent monster films. In 2007, we had D-War, a South-Korean film made for the American market. That sort of combination pretty much torpedoed any chance of the film’s success.

The largely American cast comprised all unknowns, and not only were they given insipid dialog, they couldn’t act either. If you ever want to see a show with actors reading instead of acting out their lines, this is it.

The film tried to be a little different from the typical monster movie by creating a complex and almost mythological back story on how the critters come about. But I remember that the story was so convoluted that I ended up fast forwarding all these scenes to get to the ‘good’ parts – i.e. wanton destruction.

And in that respect, at least the monster fight scenes were mildly entertaining. All computer-generated of course, but you get huge snake like critters, humanoid aliens, and lots of Apache helicopter scenes taking on those brutes.

Heck, those were the only good parts of the movie. And you don’t have to rent the film to see them. Just visit a Harvey Norman or Denki electronics store and there’s a good chance you’ll find those scenes demoed on their new large screen displays.

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Cloverfield was the monster movie of 2008 and a far better attempt than D-War or Godzilla. For starters, the film adopted cinéma vérité style, so camera panning mimics that of the human visual perspective. For much of the film until its last act, you won’t get a good look at the Big Bad Critter. That pretty much kept the audience in suspense.

Of the bunch of monster films, I enjoyed Cloverfield the most even though in terms of raw action it probably has the lowest quotient of the bunch. Much of the adrenaline comes from following the small group of young adults who’re desperately trying to get out of the monster’s rampaging path as they hide in subway tracks, abandoned buildings. Most of them don’t survive the monster’s stomping, and their demise in a couple of instances is well, unexpected. Talk about your heart stopping for a second LOL.

I vaguely read of a sequel too with the return of some of the first film’s key characters. That’s gonna be interesting, because the film off-ed them in pretty sordid fashion.

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In any case, my ratings are:

Godzilla:

D-War:

Cloverfield:

Next in the series… Disaster – Asteroids Incoming!