Universal Soldier

Universal Soldier's finest moments are fleeting but indelible; brief blips revolving around Dolph Lundgren's zapped-out, reanimated war criminal. Despite the film's horrific conceit - dead 'Nam veterans are resurrected as automated meat shields then used to defuse hostage situations - director Roland Emmerich is much more excited about presenting his stars as muscled intruders, upsetting gormless locals with their loud, pneumatic behaviour. These wildly disparate ideas only really knit together in one scene, and it's all thanks to the ear-collecting mania that Lundgren invests in his Sergeant Andrew Scott.

Following an unsuccessful, not to mention incompetent, attempt to capture or eliminate Jean-Claude Van Damme's Luc Deveraux, Scott is lumbered with several chewed-up, unresponsive underlings. In order to function effectively these souped-up stiffs must be kept on ice, leaving Scott no alternative but to drag these mushy comrades around a supermarket in search of cold storage. Scott screams at vacant shoppers and shelf-stackers, demanding they point him towards the nearest walk-in freezer. Once his men are dumped in a meat locker, Scott returns to the shop floor to hold court, ranting and raving to a stunned, schlubby audience about the 'treachery' of the South Vietnamese.

Lundgren's performance defies the neglect of Richard Rothstein, Christopher Leitch, and Dean Devlin's screenplay, motoring along entirely on the actor's raw, babbling enthusiasm. It is to Emmerich's credit that he, quite apparently, just got out of the way. Lundgren shrieks and booms, mispronouncing words then taking rote tough guy talk off in new, incomprehensible directions. Comparatively, Luc Deveraux's reawakening is a slow process, prickled then catalysed by the sameness of the situations he finds himself in. Van Damme portrays his enlightenment as a kind of rebirth, resetting Deveraux to an innocent, almost childlike state. The film leverages this into farcical situations designed to exploit Van Damme's boyish good looks and willingness (or outright desire) to disrobe.

Lundgren gets much more to chew on then. Scott, it seems, broke his programming much earlier than Deveraux, happy to play along with the military-industrial complex's latest bone-headed scheme simply because it gave him ample opportunity to brutalise people. Out on his first (screen) mission Scott, referred to by his undead call-sign GR13, is set the task of silently eliminating a posted guard. While Van Damme's GR44 heroically punches his quarry unconscious, GR13 twists his guy's head off then stamps on the prone, dead body. Universal Soldier proposes a war between a reluctant professional and a raving lunatic but then gets lost along the way, delaying the expected collision and invincible flesh conceit to amble along sex-comedy side roads that don't actually lead anywhere.

Super Bowl Spot - Independence Day: Resurgence

Enormous alien superstructures lancing cities while weightless, metropolitan debris fills the sky? While prepping Independence Day: Resurgence, Roland Emmerich and his CG teams were clearly hard at work, studying the destruction of Lithone sequence that opens the magnificent The Transformers: The Movie.

Godzilla (1998)

Roland Emmerich's stab at Godzilla is desperate to stress its weaknesses. Clocking in at nearly two and a half hours, the film spends an inordinate amount of time in the company of sitcom rejects hamming up an ugly New Yorker routine. Godzilla seems to think of itself as a Big Apple slice of life comedy that just happens to have a mammoth lizard in it - Friends with a radioactive guest star. Maria Pitillo is particularly lost, her performance nothing more than a series of vapid frowns. Likewise Matthew Broderick approaches the material with a complete absence of machismo. I don't think I've ever seen an action lead so devoid of bass. His boyish simpering is actually kind of revolting at times, particularly towards the end of the film when the actor insists on waving his arms around whilst running away from several million dollars worth of Spielberg steals. If Broderick can't even be bothered to act scared, why should we be thrilled when he escapes?

This Godzilla begins with stock footage of America's hydrogen bomb tests overlaid with French radio chatter. I presume this is supposed to illustrate the French weapon tests at Moruroa in the mid-1990s that led to a worldwide moratorium on their wine? If so, why use antiquated footage of Bikini Atoll? Those images are seared into the collective conciousness as gross examples of Cold War dick-waving. You can't add a bit of looping and pass them off as something else. Regardless, Godzilla is apparently a mutated iguana caused by the dastardly French. Their government feels so bad about it they've dispatched Jean Reno to keep an eye on the situation. From an anthropological perspective this makes Godzilla 1998 kind of interesting. The Japanese Godzilla was born from American hydrogen bomb testing, yet there was never any attempt in those films to demonise Japan's post-war allies. The original Godzilla is repeatedly considered as a punishment for mankind, Japan assuming responsibility for the creature and what it represents. All humankind has erred by allowing nuclear weapons to come into existence, not just individual countries.

In this American Godzilla the buck is passed. France is solely to blame for this terrible lizard, despite having conducted roughly a fifth of the nuclear weapons tests America has. This disingenuous white-washing harms the film. Why shouldn't Godzilla be about a country confronting its misdeeds? How patronising is it to think the filmmakers felt these questions couldn't be asked during a Summer distractor? If Godzilla can't be about national introspection, why does it instead have to revolve around drippy journalistic sabotage? Why is more time dedicated to taking pathetic potshots at Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel than considering American culpability in nuclear cataclysm? For that matter, why is Roger Ebert the mayor of New York? Wasn't he based in Chicago? This staunch empty-headedness is symptomatic of a film allergic to even the most basic level of seriousness. Godzilla has been designed as product, an anodyne unit shifter free of artistic expression or intellectual consideration. It's a contemptuous thing, riddled with antagonistic pitch think and directed at an audience it assumes to be brain dead.