I just got done with the sea battle. Fucking awesome. Corny dialogue, cookie cutter characters, and all. Only one minor nitpick so far about the whole thing and it's standard Hollywood plothole/poor writing. Just a few scenes earlier Jill was giving Aaron shit for making wild conjectures and then right after the sea battle she goes along with his wild conjecture about the whole "amniotic fluid/nuclear stabilizer." Seriously. Fuck. How the hell did they go from this to "Godzilla plays hide and seek in Manhattan?"
Checking it out now. Damn hell, that's a frustrating intro though. For the record: Ted and I originally helped get the GODZILLA film off the ground at TriStar, writing a screenplay that satisfied the studio enough to seek directors. Our draft got the interest of Jan De Bont just after he finished SPEED. During pre-production on the film (man, the storyboards looked great!) budget differences caused Jan and TriStar to part ways.
The INDEPENDENCE DAY team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich came in, and decided to write their own script. They were complimentary of our draft, and said it showed them that a film could be made -- but concluded "It wasn't a story we wanted to tell." They kept some elements, and changed most. So here is the version that might have been -- our last draft, worked on with Jan. You can see for yourself how responsible we are for the film that was eventually made.