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We all have one… or maybe seven. I’m talking about movies you shouldn’t really admit to liking but you just can’t help yourself. It's a bit like admitting to watching My Super Sweet 16 (the funniest program on TV, I tell you). However, it’s time to get it out in the open and defend our guilty pleasures.


In the summer of 1997, Sony/Columbia made the smart move of attaching the teaser trailer of their next potential hit to Men In Black. Anyone who saw it at the time is likely remember seeing a giant reptilian foot crush the skeleton of a T-Rex in a museum, followed by the tagline, “Size Does Matter”. It was their way of saying how next year's blockbuster, Godzilla, would be bigger than that summer's Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World. So began the hype machine. It was one of the first instances of a trailer advertising a film that wasn’t to be released till a year later, since hardly any footage had been shot.

Sony/Columbia bought the rights from Toho and hired writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio to pen a script, involving Godzilla battling another monster named Gryphon. The difficulty came in trying to find a director. The filmmaking duo of director Roland Emmerich and producer Dean Devlin were hot off Independence Day. They wrote their own script and were ultimately given the greenlight, as well as a deadline, after Sony announced a release date for Memorial Day. In a rush to get the film out there, there wasn’t even any time to screen test it. Believing that they’d missed an opportunity to fix mistakes, Devlin was very upset, describing it as, “The only movie I’ve ever done that we didn’t screen test.”

Sony, however, was supportive to the point that they appeared desperate for a hit. Emmerich himself thought the jokey tagline was a good idea, but weeks before its release, it was “too much,” with posters and banners everywhere, making some remark about the size of Godzilla. Deals were stuck with Taco Bell and Doritos. The trailers built curiosity by showing as little of the monster as possible. And then, someone out there thought it would be a good idea to have the film close the Cannes Film Festival (“He’s longer than the Carlton Hotel”).

Godzilla was released with an almighty thump and has since been branded a dud, a flop. It’s almost like a dirty byword that forms the basis for what we expect and hate about summer blockbusters, essentially a great big monster popcorn movie that delivers loud and explosive action. Being a teenager at the time of its release, this was what I wanted. I also hadn’t viewed any of the previous Godzilla films, which I guess might explain why I have a bit of a soft spot for this one.

Not so much a remake, the film uses the Godzilla name and tries to come up with an explanation as to why the giant lizard exists in the first place - French nuclear testing. He has for some reason come to Manhattan. In comes the military to deal with the problem, but as is Emmerich’s trademark, they need the help of a scientist to understand what they’re dealing with. Niko Tatopoulos (Broderick), who has been studying the effects of radiation, believes that they are dealing with, “the dawn of a new species.”

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