YMMV / Godzilla 2000

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• Awesome Music:
  • The Feared God, a foreboding theme for the movie curtesy of Takayuki Hattori.
  • Some of the music cues from the American cut by J. Peter Robinson aren’t too bad either, such as Godzilla vs. Orga when Orga mutates into its final form to fight Godzilla, which makes great use of Ifukube’s classic Godzilla theme.
  • Special mention to the film's US trailer, which uses Superbeast by Rob Zombie. Though the song has nothing to do with the movie, nor is it heard in the film at all, it was a perfect way to build anticipation for the movie.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The destruction of the Tokyo Opera City Tower is eerily similar to the destruction of the World Trade Center.
  • This line from Yuki after hearing that Godzilla is making his way toward a nuclear power plant. About twelve years after the film's release, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster happens following the real-life Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
    Yuki: Oh, that's just lovely. Another Chernobyl.
• Narm: The silly-sounding roars of Orga in the Toho cut. It's no wonder the later dub changed it to something that sounded legitimately creepy.
• Narm Charm: The English dub was intentionally made to sound cheesy as an homage to the Hong Kong dubs of the 60s and 70s.
• Nightmare Fuel: The manga adaptation. After the Millennians restrain Godzilla, the main characters and Godzilla see what appears to be Millennians assimilating people, as seen here.
  • They were growing bodies of their own, which makes their faces all the more horrifying when they start mutating into one horrific being.
  • The Japanese cries of the Millennian alien are oddly more abrupt, piercing and scary than the sounds in the U.S. version.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The movie experimented a lot with Chroma Key to project Godzilla onto real-life footage instead of having him trample over miniature environments all the time, and while some shots pull it off, there are many scenes where the colors and shadows don't match up, or where he appears blurry while the rest of the shot is crisp — worse, in one of the shots, his feet simply disappear into the ground for no reason.
  • Many scenes with the CGI version of the Millennian ship, thanks to its incredibly flat texture. At one point, it is shown reflecting the city lights on its underside, which makes it even more obviously fake when the camera pans to its non-reflecting top.
  • The CGI used for Godzilla while he's swimming is extremely primitive and arguably a massive step backwards from the monster from two years prior. Not helped by the lighting making it look like Godzilla's now purple instead of the usual green.
  • For several effects shots that required the film to be sped up digitally, grossly unprofessional frame ghosting rears its ugly head.
• Strawman Has a Point: Though Katagiri jumps off the slippery slope when he tries to blow up a building that he knows Shinoda is in, he initially has a fairly reasonable position: Godzilla must be destroyed because he always causes massive damage when he shows up.
• Superlative Dubbing: In probably the rarest example in the franchises history, many fans agree that the American cut of the film is superior to the Japanese cut, due to trimming the fat from the movie for a better pace and including more sound effects, dialogue and music cues to make it feel much livelier and fuller by comparison. Toho seems to agree as well to the point they haven’t released their International Dub in the US.
• Tear Jerker:
  • When Io thinks her father is dead and starts breaking down in Yuki's arms.
    • For the audience, when Akira Ifukube's theme starts playing prior to the final battle, this brings tears of joy.
• Vindicated by History: The film has seen a huge resurgence in popularity in recent years. When it first came out it was seen as a bland, run-of-the-mill retread of past Godzilla films, both Showa and Heisei, that was rushed to theaters as a response to Tristar’s infamous remake just the year before. Recently, however, it’s become recognized as one of the better Godzilla entries, often praised for its unique approach to the alien invasion premise and for having one of the more memorable final fights in the series, with some ranking it on par with GMK and Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla in terms of the best received entries of the Millennium era and the closest it got to replicating the past eras in a successful manner.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: There are some problems for sure (see above), but several other shots look pretty impressive. Godzilla's attack at Nemuro ranges from "decent" to "incredible", for instance.
• Win Back the Crowd: After the critical failure of Godzilla (1998) among Godzilla fans, this film succeeded in doing so for the American audiences. Sadly, the general public viewed the film as a sequel to the 1998 remake, unaware that it was a true Godzilla film.
• Woolseyism: The U.S. looping team handled writing very well and changed some questionable terminology from the Japanese script (Organizer G-1 becoming Regenerator G-1), and entirely overhauled the exceptionally poor original export dub they were given to work with.

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