4 Ways the New Godzilla Movie Ripped Off the Crappy '98 Flop

On top of that, both films involve the military priming a major explosion that the main characters are forced to race against, because apparently the military has only two ways to respond to things.

As we've already pointed out, both films involve monsters taking ridiculously intricate pains to destroy only the centers of buildings, like skyscraper bonsai:

Warner Bros., TriStar Pictures
"It soothes me. I scream much less now."

And remember when Matthew Broderick had a heartfelt face-to-face bro-connection with Godzilla in the 1998 version?

TriStar Pictures
"I'm dying."
"You're not dying, you just can't think of anything good to do."

Well, the 2014 version throws on some dust and terrible Batman Begins orange lighting and does the exact same thing:

Warner Bros.

"But what about the monstrously stupid idea that anyone could be cluelessly toiling away in an office while a nuclear-powered titanosaur broke the city?" you might be asking.

TriStar Pictures
Harry Shearer in 1998's Godzilla.

"WELL GUESS FUCKING WHAT," we would reply to that.

Warner Bros.
2014's Godzilla. Harry Shearer is probably in there somewhere.

Hell, both films even use the exact same Bikini Atoll nuclear test footage set over grainy titles for their opening credits. How did nobody catch this?

Warner Bros., TriStar Pictures
"We did. We just don't care."

It's a pretty dastardly bait and switch that the new film would never stoop to ... oh wait, they totally did the same thing by putting Bryan Cranston front and center in all of the previews.

Warner Bros.
One of these two men would have been able to carry this movie by himself. Guess who. Go on, guess.

Much of the promotional material for the new Godzilla was centered on fan-favorite actor Bryan Cranston, who plays a character that fucks off 20 minutes into the film. He never even sees Godzilla. The two don't share a single moment of screen time, like Pacino and De Niro in The Godfather Part II. Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the movie's actual protagonist, has an eye-blink cameo in the trailer, while the trailer itself promises a movie about TV's Walter White and his sidekick, Ken Watanabe, as they obsessively try to expose a giant monster coverup (the movie is about none of those things).

Golden Globe winner Sally Hawkins spends most of the film standing slightly in back of Academy Award nominee Ken Watanabe, who does nothing but explain the plot to the audience with a worried expression.

Warner Bros.
In the script, her lines just said "EXPOSITION HERE."

These esteemed actors could have been replaced by title cards and it would have made zero difference in the finished product.

As we mentioned above, maximizing the civilian body count seems to be the cornerstone of the army's strategy in both films. In 1998's Godzilla, they set a trap for the herculean beast in the middle of New York City. In the 2014 version, they put a nuclear bomb on a train (which is bait for the monsters, because for some reason they eat radiation and everyone at the scriptwriting meeting thought this made perfect sense) that drives straight through the state of California and the densely populated city of San Francisco. They also continuously forget about the monsters' ability to generate EMP blasts that destroy their planes and helicopters, because they keep sending planes and helicopters to attack the monsters in every single encounter (not to mention the fact that the military has ways of defending against EMP blasts in the event of a nuclear detonation by using something called a Faraday cage, which this movie completely ignores).

Both films end with a race against time as the military plans to nuke an entire American city to eradicate monsters that were birthed from atomic fire.

Check this out: Adjusting for inflation, the Matthew Broderick version grossed roughly $125 million in its first six days of release, during a time when there were no bullshit 3D or IMAX showings driving up sales. That's exactly on par with the 2014 film, except the box office gross for new Godzilla has actually dipped 67 percent in its second weekend on account of poor word of mouth -- a drop 10 percent worse than that of the 1998 version, which featured Italian stereotypes screaming the word "retard" at each other.

On top of that, Roland Emmerich's Godzilla had a production budget of $130 million, whereas its updated counterpart cost a melon-farming $300 million to produce, market, and distribute -- an amount that will require a gross of $600 million just to break even. As we've previously discussed, 1998's Godzilla managed to earn a tiny profit that wasn't enough to keep Sony from scrapping its plans for a trilogy and sitting on the film rights until they expired. So unless the remake does a historic amount of business overseas, we may see yet another American Godzilla remake two decades from now.

Toho Co., Ltd.
Pleasepleasepleaseplease.

But hey -- there's always home video sales, something that totally hasn't been on a rapid decline since the 1990s ... right?