We just passed the 20th anniversary of Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla last week, which has naturally led many to revisit the infamous Matthew Broderick-starring flop that severely underwhelmed fans of the Big G. A revisit has led some to feel that it was unfairly judged twenty years ago, while others have not softened their stance on the big-budget film.

What about the film’s creators? How do they feel about Godzilla, 20 years later? Syfy caught up with writer/producer Dean Devlin (Independence Day), who was nothing if not honest about the mistakes that were made all those years ago. First and foremost, Devlin feels the biggest mistake was in not committing to Godzilla as a character.

“I think part of the biggest problem was that I pushed Roland into doing the movie because I was a huge Godzilla fan,” Devlin explained. “I grew up with Godzilla and it wasn’t something that Roland had grown up with. He didn’t have a giant passion about Godzilla. He was able to find a story with me that he could get passionate about and he was passionate about the movie we made, but this was his take on it as opposed to honoring the Godzilla legacy in a way that would make the people who loved Godzilla happy.”

Devlin continued, “Roland and I made an intellectual idea that was interesting but not compelling filmmaking. We said in real life, a lizard is neither evil nor good, it’s just a lizard. So what if one got to that size and in its effort to survive, it threatened us, but it wasn’t mad at us? It was just simply doing what it did and it causes this problem for us. Well, that’s interesting, but that’s not Godzilla. If you go to the very first movie, Gojira, it was an evil monster. Movies after that, it was a hero. We didn’t choose either.”

“I think what we tried to do made sense, but isn’t very fulfilling. There’s this big sequence at the end of our Godzilla where you hear his heartbeat and he’s dying and it’s supposed to be emotional, but it’s not because we’re not sure how we’re supposed to feel about Godzilla, whether we were supposed to be rooting for Godzilla or scared of Godzilla. The film did not make a commitment to how you should feel about the character. And I think that was at its heart the bigger mistake than the baby Godzilla.”

Head over to Syfy to read the full interview with Devlin, wherein he admits, “we didn’t live up to what we needed to do in taking on something as iconic as Godzilla.”