Like a few movies that I like, I never seem to get to watch them all the way through. Godzilla with Matthew Broderick is one of them. Near the movie's end when the sumbarines fire at Godzilla, he encounters a wall that I presume is below the NY waterline. He claws at it and then the torpedoes hit. He falls to the bottom. What was he clawing at and why? Was he just trying to escape? He seemed to be a pretty bright beast.
You're putting more thought into this than Roland Emmerich did. Remember his previous movie had humans defeating the technologically light years advanced alien invaders by hacking into their mainframes with 1996 laptop technology.
All I remember about that GODZILLA picture was just how it felt so dumb, rather boring actually for a monster movie. And I don't "dumb" like the original Japanese exports, which at least had a cartoonish dimension to these giant (men in rubber suit) monsters beat the shit out of each other and humanity is fucked six ways to sunday. Oh and aliens too. Kids loved them at comic bookish face value, and adults liked the unintentional campy sillyness.
I do however also remember Emmerich casting the government "boobs" in the Mayor and his aide with Siskel & Ebert look-a-likes as revenge for them hating his previous pictures, even using the "Thumbs Down" gesture. You can look up their (unsurprising) panning on YouTube, where they complained that they were insulted.
Not for being ridiculed, but for not getting eating or stamped by Godzilla.
