Trailer
Plot summary
Fallout from a nuclear test in French Polynesia reaches an iguana nest. A Japanese cannery ship is later attacked in the South Pacific, and the lone surviving fisherman, questioned in a Tahiti hospital, repeats one word: Gojira. NRC scientist Niko Tatopoulos is studying how radiation affects wildlife in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl when a State Department official sends him to join the military's investigation of the creature's destructive trail. Skin he takes from a shipwreck belongs, he concludes, to a species no one knows, and he argues the animal is a mutant created by the French tests. It comes ashore in New York City, an evacuation begins, and the military sets a trap with a pile of fish. Nick also meets his ex-girlfriend, the aspiring reporter Audrey Timmonds.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Godzilla (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Toho's 2004 film Godzilla: Final Wars featured a new version of TriStar's monster renamed "Zilla"; producer Shōgo Tomiyama and director Ryuhei Kitamura said the name was chosen because Emmerich's film "took the God out of Godzilla".
- Critic and Godzilla fan Richard Pusateri coined the term GINO, "Godzilla In Name Only", to distinguish TriStar's version of the character from Toho's Godzilla.
- News that Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin had replaced Godzilla's iconic atomic breath with a "power breath" leaked before release, outraging fans and forcing the filmmakers to make last-minute changes to those scenes.
SPOILER
During the United States Marine Corps' participation in the shoot, an F-18 Marine Reserve pilot, Col. Dwight Schmidt, actually flew the plane that "fired" the missiles that killed Godzilla.- Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin wrote the first draft of the screenplay in five and a half weeks at Emmerich's vacation house in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, working on spec because TriStar had not yet green-lit the film.
- Toho producer Shogo Tomiyama pitched Patrick Tatopoulos's radically new Godzilla design to an ailing Tomoyuki Tanaka as "similar to Carl Lewis, with long legs", and chairman Isao Matsuoka approved it the next morning.
- The finished film has 400 digital shots, 185 of them featuring Godzilla, and only about two dozen practical effects, among them a 24th-scale Godzilla suit worn by stuntman Kurt Carley.
- Toho sent Sony a document of rules on how to treat Godzilla, and producer Robert Fried said they even sent him a four-page, single-spaced memo describing the physical requirements the Godzilla in the film had to have.
