People were super excited for this summer's second attempt at bringing the famous Japanese lizard to American audiences. The trailers were pretty great, Monsters director Gareth Edwards at the helm was reassuring and - best of all - it wasn't the 1998 Godzilla which everybody hated. We're not sure exactly what went wrong with Roland Emmerich's try at adapting Toho's iconic monsters across the Pacific but...oh, wait, no, that'll be it. Roland Emmerich directed it. With middle-aged Ferris Bueller as his star. And the CGI was terrible. And the monster didn't make sense. And Jean Reno wasn't in it enough. There were many problems with it, and we're unsure if a sequel would have fixed things, but we would've liked to see them try. There were some good things about the first film, after all. The cast was weird, but by no means terrible (including a rare on screen outing for Simpsons voice actor Hank Azaria), the design of the American Godzilla - nicknamed Zilla be fans - was actually kinda cool, and it had a pretty banging soundtrack. We've still got that one Jamiroquai song in heavy rotation on our iPods. TriStar initially planned to make a whole flippin' trilogy, which we're unsure about, but the plot - Matthew Broderick's scientist, guilty about killing Zilla, takes one of her babies on a globe trotting adventure - was fun, and reminiscent of the nineties cartoon spin off which involved looking after one of the monsters until it reaches adulthood and goes to fight over monsters. It's actually pretty awesome? And we would've liked to see them give a chance on the big screen. Except everybody hated the first film and Columbia lost the rights in 2003.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
