Twenty-five years ago, Roland Emmerich tried his hand at a monster movie. That movie was Godzilla, Hollywood’s first attempt to reboot the iconic, city-stomping monster for a Western audience. The 1998 film had a lot of interesting ideas in its head; unfortunately, very few of them worked. Emmerich’s film tries hard to remix the origins of its eponymous kaiju: instead of a prehistoric entity awoken by nuclear testing, Godzilla is essentially a mutated iguana. When he winds up stomping through the streets of Manhattan, it falls to a bumbling scientist (Matthew Broderick), his reluctant French companion (Jean Reno), and the less-than-helpful U.S. military to stop him.
