Alex Pappademas of Grantland called the film "the first truly joyous popcorn action movie of the season" and praised Edwards' restrained direction, stating, "I admired Edwards’s restraint, a quality I’m not accustomed to admiring in $160 million summer action movies." Richard Roeper stated, "Edwards and his team produce consistently stunning visuals", but admitted that he "would have liked to see more of Godzilla" but stated that the film is "leaps and bounds ahead of the 1998 bomb" and awarded the film a B+ rating. Tom Russo of the "Boston Globe" felt the film "is an uneven spectacle that can’t sustain its solid first-half character moments" but did state the film "can also flash a surprising, often clever sense of legacy, and is intermittently capable of thrilling us" and praised the film's special effects, stating, "Crafted with motion-capture technology and an aesthetic eye toward tradition, Godzilla is convincingly rendered here, making for some genuinely electrifying moments" but did feel that the third act's battle was "overkill" and that the principal characters were lackluster, stating the film "needs performances that ground it — and they’re just not coming from Taylor-Johnson, Watanabe, and the rest of the thespian soldiers and flabbergasted biologists who dominate the second hour" and concluded by stating, "Godzilla, Watanabe breathlessly hypothesizes, 'is here to restore balance.' The film could do with a little of that itself, thrills notwithstanding." Stephanie Zacharek of the "Village Voice" stated "Gareth Edwards's new desecration of his (Godzilla) legend should make him (Godzilla) want to eat Hollywood for lunch", feeling that the film "hits all the wrong beats" but did praise Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston's performances, stating, "Their few brief scenes, particularly Cranston's, make for the best dramatic moments in the movie" and also praised Alexandre Desplat's score and the scenes involving Godzilla but stated "it's just one tiny beat in an otherwise way-too-big movie that, weirdly, doesn't give us enough of the one big guy we showed up to see in the first place" and concluded by stating, ""Godzilla" is one of those generic, omnipresent blockbusters that's undone by the very spectacle it strives to dazzle us with: Everything is so gargantuan, so momentous, that nothing has any weight."