GODZILLA 1998

This is far from a hot-off-the-presses review, but I did want to CLEAR UP a few ongoing misgivings about Godzilla as rethought by Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin in 1998.  This Godzilla -- aka Deanzilla, aka Fraudzilla -- gets NO RESPECT but I want to point out a couple of things:

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON GODZILLA 1998

>> They do get the essentials right.  Godzilla is aquatic and primarily eats fish.

>> Godzilla is not up on dry land to take over -- only to smash some stuff and go home after some quick reconnaissance.

>> They finally got the sex of the operative right.  Sort of.  Halfway.

>>  Please note that even at this late date -- 44 years after the first sighting! -- filmmakers are STILL calling on their familiar landscum archetypes to interpret it all for the viewer.  In this case they trot out Exposition Lad, in the shape of Worm Guy -- to "explain" and thereby symbolically control something they cannot begin to manage, with or without the intervention of their scientists.  It's only put in there to make the viewers feel better.  (About what, you may well ask...)

>> And one more thing about Worm Guy (played by Matthew Broderick).  It's going to read as funny to both fish and human viewers, that in just about this ENTIRE movie, HE'S ALL WET: