Word: godzilla
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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...
Sony has bet more than $110 million on its new Godzilla, opening this week on an unprecedented 7,363 screens in hopes of breaking The Lost World's record opening weekend take of $92.7 million. An additional $50 million has reportedly been spent on a marketing scheme that includes the ubiquitous tag line "Size Does Matter" and a carefully hyped campaign of secrecy about what the modernized creature looks like. In this age of Titanic expectations, Godzilla will have to bring in more than $200 million in the U.S. alone to be considered a hit. Don't mention...
...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...
...they reinvented Godzilla. Instead of barrel legs that galumph through the Ginza, Godzilla now has runner's calves to sprint down Broadway. The lumpy, rubberized-corduroy look has given way to the towering if scaly athleticism pioneered by H.R. Giger's mantid man-eaters in the Alien series. And while the snub-nosed, micro-eared Godzilla of the '60s and '70s had a vaguely mammalian mien--appropriate for a creature whose Japanese name, Gojira, is an amalgam of kujira (whale) and gorira (gorilla)--the fin-de-siecle Godzilla has a crocodilian brow, iguana affectations, a T. Rex crouch...
Nearly 95% of the lizard's effects were created through computer graphics, and Tatopoulos' creature shop was twice the size of Jurassic Park's. But Godzilla isn't his old self: gone, for example, are his trademark maple-leaf dorsal spines, now a forest of thorns. All 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...