Godzilla

This is a movie of tremendous visual daring, magnificent special-effects work and surprising moral gravity.

The human drama isn't always as compelling as it wants to be, but at its best Godzilla is a hugely entertaining blockbuster that starts strongly and finishes with a mighty roar. The king of the monsters has returned, and it appears he's here to stay.

Edwards manages to sustain a grim, cerebral atmosphere all the way through, as if fighting the inevitable demands of the material. The movie contains enough basic money shots to please hardcore Godzilla fans without indulging in them at every opportunity. By contemporary blockbusters standards, it's practically a minimalist enterprise.

An uneven spectacle that can’t sustain its solid first-half character moments. But the movie can also flash a surprising, often clever sense of legacy, and is intermittently capable of thrilling us.

It’s always fun to watch scaly, skyscraper-size behemoths lay waste to civilization, but a bit more human drama wouldn’t have gone amiss.

The problem is that he — unlike most modern sci-fi directors, who throw so much CGI at you that they make miracles cheap — seems peculiarly stingy when it’s time to deliver.

Edwards’ Godzilla dawdles toward its Doomsday climax; the movie could win a prize for Least Stuff Happening in the First Two-Thirds of an Action Film... It’s a concept lacking a magnetic story, a package without a product.

The best giant monster movie I have ever seen. The tension is real, the characters believable, and the destruction is glorious. A perfect melding of the original Japanese mentality towards the series with American writing and filmmaking. I found myself to be completely absorbed in it and enthralled by it. There's definitely more of a focus on the human element and characters, which clearly has disappointed some. Personally I don't feel the movie could have succeeded quite in the same way. This movie has the potential to please audiences new and old. If they had just focused on Godzilla himself then this would've only appealed to old-school Godzilla fans. It would've also lost the realistic feel this movie has. Honestly I see it as the best of both worlds, and I loved old-school, Japanese Godzilla. The movie doesn't skip out on it's monster though. Godzilla is still here in all his magnificence, and director Gareth Edwards just loves to show off his massive size. I love how Godzilla is portrayed in this film, and I can't wait for the sequels this movie sets up for. It's a perfect introduction to Godzilla, and what is hopefully the start of a new series of films. The tension builds to perfection in this movie. It's an absolute blast to behold and it had me sitting on the edge of my seat in suspense many times throughout. It's an absolute masterpiece of a monster movie, and one that I recommend be at the top of your must-watch list.

It’s a fine movie, I just wish there was more Godzilla and less human drama. Every time things start to get good, they turn the camera away or jump to the next scene; I can't tell you how many times I said “aww, come on!” to the film. The parts that actually did have Godzilla were cool. It’s fine to watch once, any additional viewing, just fast forward through the human parts and to the kaiju fights.

In a lot of ways, the Roland Emmerich Godzilla is a perfect example of '90s popular cinema, for better and for worse, and I think we'll feel the same about this one in about fifteen years' time. It's dark, gritty and menacing, often to a fault. The screen is awash with grays and browns. The important CG moments are impressive and generally perform well, but they're still quite obviously digital set pieces and feel unnatural. I did find a lot more to appreciate in the tone of Godzilla '14 than in its 1998 cousin, especially in the strong admiration for the Toho source material it wears on its sleeve. In terms of focus, this could've passed for one of Japan's own: the screen spends far more time hovering around the human components than the monster, who's largely relegated to a cameo role. Those civilians are universal retreads, though, only vaguely interesting at their best moments. For the most part it's a very bland movie, slogging through a repetitive plot that had me checking my watch on the regular. The monster fisticuffs are cool, even if the impact of familiar skylines being toppled has lost some edge in the wake of Man of Steel, Pacific Rim and The Avengers, but even these are often tossed aside as afterthoughts. I lost count of how many times the screen cut away just as the king of monsters got his paws on an equally-oversized freak. Clearly it was a conscious decision to keep our eyes on the huddled masses, but that makes for a tough contradiction; artistic, yes; rewarding, no. The HALO jump seen in an early teaser trailer is probably the only thing I'll remember in a few months. Much less enthusiastic a revival than I was hoping for.

Biggest criticism: not enough Godzilla. My Rating: 5.1 out of 10 or 51% fresh.

The director and scriptwriter were absolute morons. A 2 hr Godzila movie where Godzilla gets about 10 mins of screentime. They cut away from the first encounter between godzilla and the other montster to show a kid watching it happen on TV. Whomever thought this plot was a good idea needs his head examined.