Description:
The first great monster-movie was King Kong in 1933, and the sight of the stop-motion ape crashing through the forest toward the screaming Fay Wray can still send chills up the spine. The bar has been raised many times in the past 65 years, and movie makers have to do a lot more to evoke the kind of terror and awe that Kong once brought to theaters. Roland Emmerlich and Dean Devlin, the director and producer who gave us the blockbusting über-patriotism of Independence Day, may have stumbled with Godzilla. Reviews, and more important, ticket sales, have not lived up to the hype, but one thing is clear: this movie was a colossal technical undertaking, demonstrating the extraordinary advances that have been made in the art of make-believe. The Making of Godzilla offers a glimpse inside that creative process, which seems at times more like a military operation than a movie set. Whatever your opinion of the end result, the combination of technology and old-fashioned hard work that went into the making of Godzilla is, in its own way, breathtaking. --Simon Leake
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