After a worldwide decade-long hiatus, the most bad ass 60-year old on the planet has reemerged to assert his dominance as the King of All Monsters, here to wipe out bad memories of horrible 1990’s CG-lizards, Matthew Broderick, and decades of men in cheap rubber suits stumbling through cities made of cardboard. Building on the terror of the 1954 original, “Godzilla” is a movie devoid of camp and silliness, an A-movie treatment to a B-movie concept, and it all works great.

The movie starts with a fun opening credit sequence showing old-timey footage from the 1950’s of some A-bomb tests that were actually attempts to kill Godzilla back in the day. And after this sequence, we don’t see Godzilla again until about halfway through the movie, as we get a nice, slow build to the reveal of the giant monster in his full glory. But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean nothing happens for the first half of the movie; on the contrary, we get to see the awe-inspiring and fear-inducing destruction caused by a pair of giant monsters that the military dubs “MUTOs” (standing for Massive Unknown Terrestrial Organism), and this is pretty smart by the the filmmakers, because instead of just breaking out some old monsters, they came up with their own designs for new ones, and found a way to have their characters come up with a name for these monsters that simultaneously sounds like a name of a monster from the old Toho movies but also sounds like a very plausible acronym that could actually be used by the military in a situation like this.Continue Reading …