90
Can now be appreciated not just as a minor classic of tragic destruction, but also as a somber exploration of conflicted postwar emotions.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
Not that Honda's original Godzilla is a message movie first and foremost. It's a horror flick, and an ingenious one at that, with visual effects so vivid that gimmicky spin-offs became an enduring staple of popular film.
80
Washington Post by Desson Thomson
The images are crisp. The story is restored. And there's no sign of Raymond Burr.
80
As crass as it is visionary, Godzilla belongs with--and might well trump--the art films "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Dr. Strangelove" as a daring attempt to fashion a terrible poetry from the mind-melting horror of atomic warfare.
75
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
The monster's mashing of Tokyo looks as Ed Wood-like as ever, but the film's humanity gives it depth.
63
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
The arrival of the uncut Godzilla is a great boon to monster movie fans, but will have limited appeal to others.
75
San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle
A new restoration takes a flawed bit of monster camp and turns it back into a strong, serious-minded and occasionally moving science-fiction film.
91
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
Godzilla is still the most awesome of tacky movie monsters.
50
While the Raymond Burr sequences and the subsequent clumsy English dubbing of the remaining Japanese footage made the U.S. version an unintentionally funny movie, the complete Japanese version is an unfunny bore.
80
Washington Post by Stephen Hunter
Its images of the destruction of the cities is far more powerful than in American films, where the cities are trashed for the pure pleasure of destruction, without any real sense of human loss.
The original Godzilla remains a fascinating post-war study of nuclear destruction and national tragedy. Even in the age of Oppenheimer which seems to be the definitive meditation on the atomic bomb, Godzilla's enduring legacy is a testament to the creature's cultural resilience and adaptability to metaphor. Godzilla's been a symbol for the atomic bomb, yes, but also government bureaucracy and, most recently, guilt. Even a film as old as this manages to capture the horror of atomic destruction and the sheer loss of a life a superweapon can enable with the wave of a hand - or claw, or foot.