"Godzilla" and the Critics

Above, "the King's" statue in Hibiya. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Comic Book Movie.com has snips of the "first wave" of reviews of the Legendary Pictures/Warner Bros. Godzilla.

For the most part, the critic reviews are generally favorable to the movie with the biggest kudos going to the cinematography, the monsters and the movie's ending. Most are saying that Godzilla put back the "awe" in "awesome" and that the film will satisfy the monster fans.

In a nutshell: "It delivers!"

On the negative side, the consensus among critics are that the characters aren't "fleshed out" as well as they could be or that they are superficial. Well, who goes to monster movies for fully fleshed-out characters? The Godzilla movie with the best-developed characters of all has to be the 1954 original.

Still, this Godzilla is a "marked improvement" over the 1998 Sony/TriStar Godzilla.

What hurt some of Toho's "Millennium" series of movies was that the characters they came up with had "personal issues" that were more annoying than moving forward the plot. The two that stand out as suffering the most from this were the Mechagodzilla movies, Godzilla x Mechagodzilla (2002) and Godzilla x Mothra x Mechagodzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003) (the second one being the worst).

I will quote one critic whose comments are in the article (chosen at random):

DEN OF GEEK: "Most Creative & Striking Summer Blockbuster We’ve Seen In Years"

"This new Godzilla lacks the sense of despair present in Ishiro Honda’s 1954 original. But in its place is something relatively fresh in films such as this: an absence of cynicism. There’s an underlying theme in here about parents protecting children, and of people simply trying to do the right thing in the face of disaster. In Edwards’ reading of Godzilla, there isn’t necessarily any such thing as good or evil. There’s merely humanity and nature, with the former standing awe-struck in the destructive presence of the latter. Most importantly, Godzilla himself emerges just as he should: a bellowing, powerful force; a true king of the monsters." - Ryan Lambie

If you are interested in seeing what the other critics are saying, go to the link at the beginning of this blog post.