Godzilla

Roland Emmerich disregarded the basic rule of kaiju films and immediately presents us with a monster in the first few minutes. He prepares a strong weapon, which unfortunately also fails at times, including the characters that are often quite bad. This could still be overlooked if it wasn't just a nonsense with a giant monster, where most scenes don't make much sense and are only piled up thanks to the screenwriters. "Godzilla" from 2014 is not brilliant, but it understands the genre much better and translates it into a modern form. (05/28/2014)

Godzilla is a bland cocktail of popcorn entertainment mixed up from dozens of older films about all kinds of lizards. Matthew Broderick is uninteresting in the lead role, Maria Pitillo is hysterical and the irradiated lizard, as tall as a mid-sized skyscraper, passes through the narrow tunnels of the New York subway without a single tremor or sound. So why am I giving Godzilla three stars? Because that’s the average between one and five. The duo of Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin gets one star and the visual-effects masters get five. As does the laid-back Jean Reno, who justifies his participation in this fiasco with his sense of responsibility for the nuclear test explosions carried out by his native country in French Polynesia. (04/11/2002)

I don't know if the film has matured, or if I have, either way, whatever qualms I had with Emmerich's Godzilla are gone. It's an excellent disaster comedy with consistently impressive visual effects that can be compared to Independence Day without exaggeration, thanks in part to Arnold's excellent score. (10/23/2009)

Emmerich is a megalomaniac and I must admit that I rather enjoy watching his destruction of our Mother Earth. Because this usually concerns the USA (very satisfying), and this time round more precisely it was New York where he let that famous lizard reap havoc. But what is the point of all that destruction and breathtaking special effects if the picture doesn’t come out with anything new? Nick Tatopoulos is the spitting image of Daniel Jackson from Emmerich’s previous work, Stargate, and we even come across O'Neill here, now demoted to sergeant, but I think you know what I’m getting at. And it’s the same with the entire story which, despite being nice to look at, continues in the same old rut that we have seen a million times before. So, thanks to the excellent special effects and Jean Reno, Godzilla is a relaxing movie where you can see another of Emmerich’s many ways of “How to Destroy America". Nothing more, nothing less. And what about the end? I’m sincerely intrigued to see if anybody lets themselves be talked into filming Godzilla 2. They should jump at the opportunity. Or rather not? ;) (08/06/2006)

Godzilla is a B-movie brainchild to such an extent that the measure of its success is no longer the age-old sympathy directed towards the fascination with something monstrously powerful and seemingly invincible, but only Emmerich's traditional faith in a wide audience with a tolerance for a film that's silly and also disrespectful to its predecessors that looks so cool regardless that we'll go see it anyway, and the German demolition man knows how to do that like few others. His vision of a clash between a heroic (but surprisingly stupid) American army and a gloriously overgrown lizard, however endearingly illogical and ridiculously megalomaniacal, really does seem like a dream come true for most little boys, who at the word Godzilla imagine just as much destruction and trampled-down goons in uniform as Mr. Emmerich "sacrificed" for the film. Moreover, it's all terribly suited to the targeted humour and Jean Reno in particular, whose character eventually becomes a very iconic figure. Anyone who didn’t have fun with the superbly edited and choreographed car-Godzilla chase is not normal. In the past, enthusiasm, today, and taking into account Edwards’s epic remake, just a little harmless joy... 3 and 1/2* (05/26/2014)