Noutions Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Platypuschow My understanding of Godzilla, King of the Monsters! was that it was the USA's first outing with the titular monster. I was kind of mistaken.You see Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is not an original US made movie. Now we all know the US have a long history of making inferior versions of foreign films but here is something else entirely.Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is merely a compressed version of the original Japanese Godzilla (1954). No I mean literally, it IS the Japanese movie but with a few additional scenes added. These scenes star Raymond Burr (Perry Mason) as a reporter who has travelled to Japan to get the story of this giant monster.So 90% of the movie is just the original Japanese one and 10% is American footage. And this was released as a US Godzilla film!? What an absolute crock!I simply couldn't believe what I was watching. It's fairly interesting how they managed to integrate Burr into the movie, but this simply isn't a new film. It's like watching a directors cut with a few additional scenes!Godzilla, King of the Monsters! is one of those movies that simply should never have existed.The Good:Raymond BurrThe Bad:The whole fact it exists is a bit of a jokeThings I Learnt From This Movie:I'm very glad this trend of ripping entire movies and modifying them didn't catch onPerry Mason walking just doesn't sit right with me

Matthew Kresal It's hard to believe it's now been more than six decades since Godzilla was first unleashed upon the world. This year marks sixty years since American audiences first met the towering monster but how they met him wasn't quite how Japanese audiences first met him two years earlier. Godzilla: King Of The Monsters! as the American version of the film came to be known was an interesting mixture of the 1954 film with newly filmed material to create an interesting hybrid and, thanks to a fairly recent Criterion Collection release, it's possible to watch and judge both films separately and together.The way that this hybrid version works is rather neat. Instead of releasing a subtitled version of the original film or dubbing it into English in its entirety, the original film is reimagined and reedited to an extent. The focus on the film ends up being a Western journalist named Steve Martin (played by Raymond Burr who is perhaps best known for his role as attorney Perry Mason) who ends up in Japan during a flight and stays to cover the unfolding events. Along the way he ends up present in many of the original film's sequences and interacts with its lead characters. It's an interesting way to do things to be sure.To accomplish this, the original film is restructured. It ends up largely being told in flashback, opening with Tokyo in ruins with Burr's Martin among the rubble. Taken to hospital, Martin takes the viewer back through the events of the previous few days. King Of Monsters takes a conventional linear narrative and does something rather more interesting with by reworking how it unfolds. Seeing the film for the first time right around a decade ago, it's a move that built tension into the plot by leaving the viewer wondering what had happened. Seeing this version now and practically back to back with the original, I still find it an admirable idea and quite a successful one.There's also the business of putting a character into scenes he was never in to begin with. For the most part that's done successfully by having Martin off on the sidelines where he can see events but only rarely interact with them. It's easy to watch the film and see where it would have been possible for Martin to have featured in the film quite plausibly. Indeed there's times when the film feels a bit like Trials and Tribble-ations, the 1997 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode which had characters from that series interacting with the Original Series Enterprise crew on the sidelines of one of its episodes. Burr himself does a good job in terms of his performance to make everything work and he's got some effective moments such as his reporting of the rampage of Godzilla through Tokyo. On the while, the filmmakers efforts are often successful.It isn't always successful though. Despite laudable efforts to get cinematography and other elements to match, they never quite do. There's an obvious difference in the old footage and the new footage just in the way it looks which I suspect is probably down to film stock. Also the decision to dub some of the Japanese dialogue but not other moments comes across feeling very weird as there's times when characters swap back and forth between Japanese and English without any good reason to (except for audience understanding when Martin isn't around). Plus, as well as the efforts to insert Burr into the film are, there's times when it becomes blatantly obvious that he wasn't there and he's talking to doubles in an effort to advance his involvement with the plot with prime examples being his conversation with Dr. Yamane to join the group heading to Oko Island or talking with Emiko and Ogata in the hospital.Something else gets lost in the process as well. There's a thoughtful edge to the original Japanese version which helps it to raise above many other monster films. By restructuring the film, reediting parts of it, and cutting a sizable chunk out of it it loses some of that thoughtful edge. A lot of talk about nuclear weapons and how they've had an effect on Godzilla gets lost and the dilemma faced by Dr. Serizawa loses a significant amount of its impact by being effectively reduced to melodrama. That thoughtfulness is still there in bits and pieces but it's full impact isn't present and it ends up being lost almost entirely in places.In turning Godzilla into Godzilla: King Of The Monsters!, perhaps more is lost than is gained. It loses some of its thoughtful edge while the quality of the overall product is hampered somewhat by some of the dubbing and efforts to shoehorn a Western character into a Japanese film. Yet the efforts to fit that character in works more often than not with Burr making an admirable effort in his new main role. Is it better than the original film? No it isn't. Is it worth seeing, either on its own or as a curiosity? Most definitely. If not else, it stands as one of the great examples of how to take one film and make it into something a bit different through the magic of filmmaking.

WakenPayne I'm going to be reviewing both this and the far superior original film. I'm not a Godzilla fan, in the sense that I haven't really seen any of the movies all that much and for the most part I haven't really gotten into the ones I have seen other than when the Americans tried it in 2014 and the original. If you want my humble opinion, while it does have it's problems the original to me, is one of the best early monster movies I've seen, capturing a grim tone and while it wasn't anything special in terms of story and characters what worked was the execution. Okay the plot? Steve Martin inserts himself into scenes from the original, sometimes dubbed (poorly with nearly racist accents), other times not and having Martin ask another Japanese guy what they're saying or what they're doing. These dubs also conflict with the character of those in the original movie to the extent of... I seriously didn't think a fundamental character motivation could be screwed up as badly as they did with Serizawa. He casually shows his girlfriend (or in this one "Arranged to be wed fiancée") his experiment despite him saying in both the original and this that he doesn't want anyone to know because of how he'd be remembered and how they'd use it later. I'll also say this movie is weird too, when Godzilla is revealed Steve Martin stands for a bit instead of running with the Japanese characters. In short, I seriously didn't think re-editing a completed film would result in so much of what made the original being great lost in translation. And I know this is a given considering but Martin also does nothing to the story! The most contribution he makes is recording a tape describing what Godzilla is doing to his boss... "Yes, I'm sure this tape would survive (if it comes to that) attacks from this monster that's 400 feet tall, can survive H Bombs and breathe heated radiation all over Tokyo." All in all, Don't... Just watch the original.

skybrick736 Having watched the original Gojira right before the American produced debauchery which is King of the Monsters, I can't help but be disappointed in it. Adding in American actor Raymond Burr, who did alright in the film didn't mesh at all with the story or editing of the original Japanese characters. The movie didn't have the dark atmosphere like Gojira portrayed which led to the Godzilla scenes being a little duller. Many of the important scenes describing the message of nuclear bombing was cut from the American version leaving a bad taste in my mouth. As a modern day movie watcher I would suggest to definitely skip this movie and check out the original Japanese original since dubbing foreign movie classic is surely an outdated method.