Don’t worry.  Just because a film comes from Japan and has the numbers “2000” in its title, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will be as bad as Pokémon 2000.  And just because a film has the word “Godzilla” in its title, it doesn’t necessarily mean it will be as bad as the 1998 travesty that shared the same name.

Well, maybe you should worry after all.  Godzilla 2000 certainly can’t be considered a good film by any stretch of the imagination.  Made in Japan and poorly dubbed in English, the picture is neither cheesy enough to make you laugh at it, nor good enough for you to enjoy it as a conventional action flick.  The plot is laughable and the film features a closing line so ridiculous you’ll have to hear it to believe it.

In Godzilla 2000, the giant lizard is still as nasty as he wants to be, emerging from the ocean to use large ships as chew-toys and to stomp electrical transformers into oblivion.  When he heads toward a huge nuclear power plant, the people in the Godzilla Prediction Network raise their cumulative eyebrow, thinking that the lizard may have some wacky ulterior motive in his seemingly random attacks.

The GPN continually butts heads with a governmental agency called the Crisis Control Initiative.  While the GPN wants to study the giant beast, the CCI is hell-bent on destroying him.  Of course, their petty differences are put on the back burner when a mysterious underwater rock turns out to be a sixty-billion-year-old spaceship that has apparently been waiting to drain the Earth of its precious computer data.  Hmmm…I guess that makes sense.  Aliens saw dinosaurs roaming around during our Cretaceous Period, and figured the planet would someday host a technologically advanced civilization.  They must have seen those kids from Land of the Lost and thought evolution would be a much quicker process.

There are a lot of silly moments in Godzilla 2000, and I hope that at least some of them were intentional.  Dubbing foreign films in English usually results in bad translations which end up being inadvertently hysterical, but only one made me laugh here.  A guy in a restaurant complains that the teriyaki is cold, but doesn’t care “as long as the beer is cold.”  Then he downs a glass of a clear liquid that is obviously not beer.

When something like this is the standout moment of a film, skipping the multiplex might be a good idea.

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