Christofer Pallu’s review published on Letterboxd:
Discussed here, along with MONSTERS.
"GODZILLA (...) is an awry spectacle, which maintains a clear dichotomy between the (predominant) sequences about the characters and those about the monsters. If one part of the San Francisco sequence, when the humans are running for a shelter, initially reeks of cowardice by denying the great confrontation at its center, this is soon justified and compensated in the next scene, with the paratroopers’ jump in the city right after it has been totally transformed by destruction, establishing a new direction, for the first time clearly denoting the insignificance of human actions before the event, this scene, as well as the one where the secondary creatures attempt to reproduce, is a small (but important) fragment that recalls the beauty found at the ending of MONSTERS. Unfortunately, this makes all the more incomprehensible the narrative’s resolution with the family hug, whose personality is nil, low appropriations of Spielbergian clichés, characters who exist only to keep the plot going and (as any extra in the midst of mass destruction) to potentialize the spectacle by putting it always through human perspective, which actually comes closer to an easy resource to bring a sense of proportion. For that reason, scenes that strive for dramatic grandeur, as in the abandonment of the wife (the husband’s desperate look to an empty hall) and son (particularly in the shot showing the inside of the bus and the mother’s face through the door’s glass, disappearing with its motion), isolatedly well constructed, end up losing all their meaning because there is no support for this drama, Edwards’ interest in people in this specific project is a shot in the foot, for the almost complete absense of contextual development makes all relationships empty, the script is too poor, barely functional, and his scene-building is not yet mature enough to sustain his intentions in such case."