Hacker Cinema
Godzilla
1998 · Film · 138 min
Directed by Roland Emmerich
French nuclear tests irradiate an iguana into a giant monster that viciously attacks freighter ships in the Pacific Ocean. A team of experts, including Niko Tatopoulos, conclude that the oversized reptile is the culprit. Before long, the giant lizard is loose in Manhattan as the US military races to destroy the monster before it reproduces and it's spawn takes over the world.
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7 comments on Hacker News
> Look at movies set during various decades;
In the 90s a lot of movies had accompanying songs that would go into the charts. I remember Titanic, Bond movies, Godzilla, gangsters paradise, some Bryan Adam’s and Aerosmith songs.
I don’t know if that is still the case today as I listen mostly listen my own Spotify playlists or ”classic” radio stations (meaning 90s/00s music nowadays).
I can imagine it was an effect of the commercial music industry at the time and these songs were heavily subsidized by the movie’s marketing budget to get into the charts.
The Japanese don't care much for Roland Emmerich's 1997 Godzilla. Because the rights to the character are owned by Toei, that character occasionally appears as a joke in Japanese Godzilla films as "Zilla" (because he is pathetic and not a god).
The current Western Godzilla from 2024 on fared better with Japanese audiences, but they consider him too fat or something.
That was one of the last movies that Gene Siskel reviewed with Ebert on his show. Siskel actually had to phone in to the show from a hospital - and he didn't like the movie either. But I remember that Ebert specifically asked Siskel how he'd felt about the fact that there were two characters in the movie named Ebert and Siskel - that were obviously intended to make fun of them.
Siskel called it cheap. But then he added, as a purely objective criticism, that the bit never actually paid off. That he was expecting Godzilla to attack the characters, but instead they're just still standing around talking at the end of the film. What was the point?
But whatever you think of any of that, that's what was so great about their show (and about this review, for that matter). That it creates this "middle space" between viewer and film-maker, for this additional giddy social mix of reactions and opinions -- all the "best of the year!" and "what were they thinking?"
Or maybe I'm just saying that sometimes I really miss Ebert.
The 1996 release of Godzilla with Matthew Broderick had a character named Mayor Ebert, and this was no accident. Director Roland Emmerich had apparently gotten a bad review from him in the past and decided to get his revenge by naming this pathetic character in the movie after Roger Ebert.
Mayor Ebert : What the hell's the matter with you people? You've caused more damage than that goddamn thing did!
Gene - Mayor's Aide : All right, Mayor, calm down. Have some candy.
Mayor Ebert : [flails his arms around like a child having a tantrum, knocking the bag of candy out of Gene's hand] No, I don't want any candy! Leave me alone
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120685/characters/nm0503627?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t6
Godzilla 1998 popped up on streaming feeds recently. I watched it for the first time in decades and was happy with it. It got so many things right for a dumb blockbuster. I noticed Mayor Eberts as the bumbling mayor. This prompted me, like many others I'm sure, to read Eberts' review of Godzilla 1998. He panned it. Almost all of the critiques felt like they would be considered praise when compared against the blockbusters of today. The final line of critique, and imo the most valid, was the lack of message/theming in the conclusion of the movie.
I like Eberts' reviews. He brought good thoughts to the conversation. I think his harsh criticism of Emmerich movies was unwarranted. For a few years Emmerich had it imo.
I think the same bridge problems also occur for the 1998 movie version of Godzilla. There, it gets stuck in the Brooklyn Bridge which refuses to collapse despite the cables being pulled out.
"For cinematic CG the models, textures and other assets are absolutely huge - it's not unusual for a single shot to come to hundreds of gigabytes."
I recall reading an article, IIRC in CineFX, about the Godzilla model in Gozilla 2000 (the Devlin and Emmerich film). The textures for their Godzilla model alone were something like 900 MB.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Pixar introduced a renderfarm hosted in Azure.
Although the amount of data is very large, you don't general end up taking the bandwidth hit all at once. If you have your renderfarm set up on Azure, you could set up a plugin for your animation software, e.g. Maya, that uploads the assets for the scene you're working on and renders it on an Azure virtual machine configured with multiple processors, then download the rendered image data. One you upload the assets once, you will rarely if ever have to upload the whole lot of them again if the render management software is smart enough to keep track of which files you've modified since the last time you rendered. So you've modified a mesh but none of its textures, it only needs to upload the mesh in order to re-render.
It's hardly trivial, and for the larger shops like WETA Digital that are creating massive, virtual sets with massive, virtual armies modeled and rendered with Massive (couldn't resist :)), they can afford an in-house renderfarm -- and the costs will favor it.
For a smaller shop, that might not be so easy, BUT there are shops that are pulling off some pretty amazing animations without buying the pricey software... outfitting a renderfarm with Photorealistic RenderMan or Mental Ray or Final Render licenses can get quite expensive -- when last I checked, it was something like $2000 or $2500 per machine for a Mental Ray rendernode license. PhotoRealistic RenderMan was in the same price range.