Wordiezett So much average

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Candida It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Julian R. White GODZILLATHON REVIEWS: #1I can always say that I prefer the original Japanese version of this film, but this version as well will always hold a special place in my heart. I have been an avid Godzilla fan ever since I was 6 years old. Now I am 23 and watching the film really brings me back to my childhood. As I got older I learned that the creator of this film did so to use a monster as an analogy to describe the widespread terror and death that Japan experienced when they were bombed in WW2. I have never been so ashamed of my own country than when I am watching this film. The scene where the young girl is crying over her mother's body will haunt me forever. Though this film isn't necessarily my top favorite, it's certainly one of 30 Godzilla films (currently) That I feel every fan should see at some point.

O2D The first Godzilla movie sets the pace for a string of long boring movies with 10 minutes of action and 80 minutes of terrible actors trying to fill time. With toys tanks,fire breath that looks like ice and an invisible plot, this movie will have you hoping he kills everyone. The trailer is ridiculous.They say this is better than anything Jules Verne ever wrote, that is total non-sense. Jules Verne's worst story is a million times better than this.There is literally no story here.The best part of the movie is that all the signs in the Tokyo airport were in English.Too funny. Skip the whole franchise,you'll thank me later.

Hitchcoc I saw this late one night. My parents were in bed and I sneaked downstairs to watch TV. I was about ten and I was transfixed. I was crazy for dinosaurs and had seen "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms." This was a nice addendum to my enjoyment of these big lizards. I think the big guy was handled very well in this film. I never felt Raymond Burr detracted from anything. This was the time of the fear of radiation, and Godzilla, like the Beast, had epic doses of it. Part of the fun is waiting for the thing to show up in the city and start knocking down buildings. He doesn't disappoint. It's too bad that these Japanese production companies went on the cheap later, also creating ludicrous monsters. I will always remember the first one fondly.

Matthew Kresal It's hard to believe it's now been more than six decades since Godzilla was first unleashed upon the world. This year marks sixty years since American audiences first met the towering monster but how they met him wasn't quite how Japanese audiences first met him two years earlier. Godzilla: King Of The Monsters! as the American version of the film came to be known was an interesting mixture of the 1954 film with newly filmed material to create an interesting hybrid and, thanks to a fairly recent Criterion Collection release, it's possible to watch and judge both films separately and together.The way that this hybrid version works is rather neat. Instead of releasing a subtitled version of the original film or dubbing it into English in its entirety, the original film is reimagined and reedited to an extent. The focus on the film ends up being a Western journalist named Steve Martin (played by Raymond Burr who is perhaps best known for his role as attorney Perry Mason) who ends up in Japan during a flight and stays to cover the unfolding events. Along the way he ends up present in many of the original film's sequences and interacts with its lead characters. It's an interesting way to do things to be sure.To accomplish this, the original film is restructured. It ends up largely being told in flashback, opening with Tokyo in ruins with Burr's Martin among the rubble. Taken to hospital, Martin takes the viewer back through the events of the previous few days. King Of Monsters takes a conventional linear narrative and does something rather more interesting with by reworking how it unfolds. Seeing the film for the first time right around a decade ago, it's a move that built tension into the plot by leaving the viewer wondering what had happened. Seeing this version now and practically back to back with the original, I still find it an admirable idea and quite a successful one.There's also the business of putting a character into scenes he was never in to begin with. For the most part that's done successfully by having Martin off on the sidelines where he can see events but only rarely interact with them. It's easy to watch the film and see where it would have been possible for Martin to have featured in the film quite plausibly. Indeed there's times when the film feels a bit like Trials and Tribble-ations, the 1997 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode which had characters from that series interacting with the Original Series Enterprise crew on the sidelines of one of its episodes. Burr himself does a good job in terms of his performance to make everything work and he's got some effective moments such as his reporting of the rampage of Godzilla through Tokyo. On the while, the filmmakers efforts are often successful.It isn't always successful though. Despite laudable efforts to get cinematography and other elements to match, they never quite do. There's an obvious difference in the old footage and the new footage just in the way it looks which I suspect is probably down to film stock. Also the decision to dub some of the Japanese dialogue but not other moments comes across feeling very weird as there's times when characters swap back and forth between Japanese and English without any good reason to (except for audience understanding when Martin isn't around). Plus, as well as the efforts to insert Burr into the film are, there's times when it becomes blatantly obvious that he wasn't there and he's talking to doubles in an effort to advance his involvement with the plot with prime examples being his conversation with Dr. Yamane to join the group heading to Oko Island or talking with Emiko and Ogata in the hospital.Something else gets lost in the process as well. There's a thoughtful edge to the original Japanese version which helps it to raise above many other monster films. By restructuring the film, reediting parts of it, and cutting a sizable chunk out of it it loses some of that thoughtful edge. A lot of talk about nuclear weapons and how they've had an effect on Godzilla gets lost and the dilemma faced by Dr. Serizawa loses a significant amount of its impact by being effectively reduced to melodrama. That thoughtfulness is still there in bits and pieces but it's full impact isn't present and it ends up being lost almost entirely in places.In turning Godzilla into Godzilla: King Of The Monsters!, perhaps more is lost than is gained. It loses some of its thoughtful edge while the quality of the overall product is hampered somewhat by some of the dubbing and efforts to shoehorn a Western character into a Japanese film. Yet the efforts to fit that character in works more often than not with Burr making an admirable effort in his new main role. Is it better than the original film? No it isn't. Is it worth seeing, either on its own or as a curiosity? Most definitely. If not else, it stands as one of the great examples of how to take one film and make it into something a bit different through the magic of filmmaking.