Critic Reviews

Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters — a Jurassic knockoff of King Kong whose ritual stomping of Tokyo never quite lets you forget that you’re watching a man in a lizard suit trash a very elaborate toy train set.

Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is the story that began it all, laying the themes of Japanese kaiju that would endure for decades.

While much of Godzilla, King of the Monsters is second-rate, there's no doubt that you're watching a star being born.

This ballad of destruction reveals itself as one of the most exciting, enjoyable and moving of them all.

This is the one Godzilla movie in which the title character plays second fiddle to the humans. While the film's moral and ethical situations are interesting, they are not as compelling as the film's adherents would have us believe, and their resolutions are simplistic.

The Americans got hold of the much superior Japanese original, Godzilla, and edited into it 20 minutes-worth of Burr, with his vacant and oddly stiff expression, in order to spice things up. Still, without Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, the awesome cinematic hero might have remained a merely regional success, a giant Japanese lizard confined to its own country.

The 1956 film, which adds Raymond Burr as reporter Steve Martin, feels like watching the original version through a foggy window. The end result is the feeling that something is missing.

The whole thing is in the category of cheap cinematic horror-stuff.