Word: emmerichs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...assembled over nearly a half-century by Toho Studios, Godzilla's propagator and the cinematic demiurge of the Land of the Rising Saurians. This mishnah of the face and form and spirit of Japan's most popular mutant antihero was solemnly handed to Dean Devlin, 35, and Roland Emmerich, 42, in 1996, almost as soon as the pair signed to produce and direct a new version of the monster classic. "We had to read it before we could write the script," says Devlin. The implicit caution: thou shall not take Godzilla's name in vain...
After perusing Toho's holy writ and digesting its meaning, Emmerich faxed the parameters of the studio's Godzilla-by-committee to Patrick Tatopoulos, creator of the aliens in Independence Day, the duo's biggest hit so far. As fate would have it, Tatopoulos never got the fax. Forging ahead anyway, he designed a monster that tampers with nearly every rule in The Book and is likely to leave fans of the old radioactive reptile either in awe or screaming "Heresy...
...that the King of the Monsters--who made his debut in a 1954 Japanese film (re-edited and released in the U.S. two years later with new footage featuring Raymond Burr as an American reporter)--would sooner or later be remade. "For me, it was always very simple," says Emmerich. "Godzilla was one of the last concepts of the '50s that had never been done in modern form--that idea of the giant monster as in Tarantula or The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Why not do them again?" But, he says, "we were really concerned about the cheese factor...
...that really remains is the Godzillic roar, pitched higher than a foghorn but just as resonant, sort of like a herd of elephants on methamphetamines. And that's by default. A whole audio team was given the task of duplicating the sound but couldn't. And so Devlin and Emmerich simply picked up the beast's original "yell" from Toho's sound library...
...Director Emmerich gives the movie the solid, confident feel of a good adventure, using his locations to the full, idiosyncratic thrill-value of each. These lead to striking shots of a desert near a military base and several confused urban crowd scenes. In the beginning of other sequences, the screen bursts into white, as July 4th draws nigh. The story, written by director Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, has a handy way of faithfully returning to the bits of exposition and information dropped along the way. The drunken pilot (Randy Quaid) whom we see being teased early...