What the new, monstrously budgeted Godzilla brings home is that size doesn’t matter -- that tacky crudeness harnessed to a real vision can have more brute power than all the state-of-the-art computer wizardry that Hollywood’s money can buy.

| Feb 15, 2023

This 'Zilla is no thrillah. The only thing huge about it is the size of its failure, with monsters straight out of Jurassic Park (yawn), a plot thinner than the butter topping on popcorn and mailed-in acting by the cast.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 15, 2023

How do you screw up "Squish" and "Aargh"? By spending more than $100 million on marvelous special effects, another $50 million on a brilliant marketing campaign, and, then, forgetting to invest any money on a logical script. That's how.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 15, 2023

Its sodden state derives from its shameless assault on the moviegoing public. This isn't art. It isn't even great trash. It's a con game, and we bear the claw marks.

| Feb 15, 2023

While the spectacular special effects are the obvious main attraction, Godzilla, at more than two hours long, is bogged down by paper-thin characters and uninteresting subplots.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 15, 2023

It's hard to imagine Godzilla -- or any movie, for now -- topping Titanic in popularity... But Godzilla, which delivers unpretentious fun with a blithe spirit, will surely give that box-office behemoth a healthy run for its money.

| Feb 15, 2023

Godzilla leaves nothing to the imagination. It also leaves nothing much for its stars to do.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 15, 2023

Godzilla is a clip-job on celluloid. Having swiped pages from nearly every disaster movie they've ever seen, Emmerich and Devlin try to draw attention away from their larceny by distracting product placements.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 15, 2023

With every technological advantage at his disposal, Emmerich has made a movie that is so emotionally uninvolving you can’t help but scrutinize every minor detail -- most of which come up lacking.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 15, 2023

This cheesy turkey is also a bit hammy. Come to think of it, this isn't a movie. It's a delicatessen.

| Feb 15, 2023

The makers of Godzilla obviously devoted so much manpower and time and energy and money to the admittedly fabulous special effects that they apparently had no budget left over for actors.

| Feb 15, 2023

The film doesn't spare anything when it comes to special effects. That makes it fun to watch -- for a while. But the visual splash comes at the expense of everything else.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 15, 2023

Slickly produced, visually deft, Godzilla falters because it lacks soul.

| Feb 15, 2023

What keeps the movie from being a complete summer bummer is the grace of the monster itself... But all the sound and fury of modern technical wizardry can't compensate for the film's hollowness.

| Feb 15, 2023

Perhaps the most extraordinary achievement is to make the biggest monster the planet has ever seen hardly register at all on screen.

| Feb 14, 2023

Godzilla is yet another special effects spectacular cued to the biff-and-splat vibrations of the arcade game. Forget any notion of the action set-piece or the art of building towards a climax. You won't find any of that nonsense happening here.

| Feb 14, 2023

Emmerich and Devlin seem to have created a new subgenre: Generic Destruction.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 14, 2023

Godzilla fills its non-spectacle sequences with turgid emoting and plot shifts so clearly at the service of the special effects budget that they are painful to behold.

| Feb 14, 2023

Other than the way the giant lizard looks -- which does turn out to be pretty spectacular -- there's not a whole heck of a lot going on in this film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 14, 2023

This is what a summer spectacular should be: big, bold, well-told.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2023