Why so much hype?

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

Egad, this was horrible. Unfortunately, the version I watched had only the awful, awful English dub, which featured an insufferable brat kid who delights in calling a female reporter an "imbecile" and such memorable dialogue as, "why does Godzilla always protect us?" with the "moving" (sarcastic) response, "I guess there's a little Godzilla in all of us." More significantly, the storyline was incoherent, dumb and (worst of all) just boring. Basically, Godzilla resurfaces around the same time as an alien ufo that had been underwater for something like 60 million years, for no good reason. The alien (there only seems to be one) decides to somehow use "Godzilla cells" or some such nonsense to adapt to Earth's environment and synthesize a (yep) giant monster body, presumably to use to ravage humanity. Human weapons prove absolutely ineffective. The main human characters are a pro-Godzilla ex-scientist (the one with the idiotic ending dialogue quoted above) and his former friend (who more sensibly wants to kill Godzilla, but that guy turns out to be a moron as well). The brat kid is the daughter of the first guy. Godzilla spends most of the film letting himself get shot by both human and alien weaponry while he just roars, stands there, and takes it-- what is this sh**? What happened to the awesome king of the monsters? Finally, much too late into the movie, Godzilla starts using his atomic breath, which is about his only effective weapon here.Naturally Godzilla ends up saving the Earth from the alien. But there is an idiotic scene afterward where the anti-Godzilla dude just yells at Godzilla and stands there like an idiot while Godzilla swats and kills him! Pro-Godzilla dude yells at anti-Godzilla dude to take cover and tries to save him, but the dork just ignores him and lets himself be killed. What was he doing, trying to prove he was a tough guy? In the dumbest way possible?I'm a pretty big Godzilla fan, but this is not a movie I'll ever care to watch again.

Viewers of The Rachel Maddow Show know that she considers "infrastructure" sexy. If so, then Godzilla must be one heck of a stud as he manages to destroy more "infrastructure" in 20 seconds than we can build in a year!This may be a 21st-century Godzilla, but it hearkens back to the first one in the early 50s. Nothing much has changed about him in 55 years. He is still massive and the absolute center of attention. Here, he competes with a space villain that wants to be the ultimate monster - shades of the Joker! So, who wins the greatest battle in history up to the time of The Batman and The Joker? The transformation of the alien from a 60 million old rock to a sleek spacecraft to a magnificent creature was beautiful, but such beauty is still no match for Godzilla. Needless to say, a whole lot more infrastructure was destroyed in the final beautiful battle. Rachel would not doubt find that very sexy.

After a misguided, high-tech Hollywood makeover the scourge of the Orient is back where he belongs, in a rubber suit at Toho Studios, kicking over another pint sized facsimile of downtown Tokyo.Never mind the actual plot, in which the big lizard is interrupted during his latest rampage to do battle with an anonymous alien "from another galaxy" (according to one farsighted expert). The grassroots Godzilla Prediction Network wants to protect the title character for purely scientific research, putting them at odds with the evil bureaucracy of the Crisis Control Intelligence Agency, better known by their telltale acronym CCIA.Godzilla himself is offstage for much of the film, perhaps because no one wanted to squander the valuable screen time of a star whose range of talent is limited to stepping on tinker-toy cities. The actual battle scenes are more or less typical of the series, with lots of enthusiastic low budget FX, in this case borrowed (somewhat blatantly, and with more than a little irony) from the same pyrotechnic stockpile used by Hollywood's 'Godzilla' director Roland Emmerich in his space invader blockbuster 'Independence Day' (note too the gratuitous lift of verbatim dialogue from Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove'!).The result is a textbook guilty pleasure, carelessly dubbed by voice talents who must have had trouble keeping a straight face delivering lines like the following, from an astonished soldier: "…did you see that flying rock go by? It's unbelievable!" Or the final, philosophic aside, explaining why Godzilla has once again saved mankind (and ignoring the truly awesome trail of devastation in his wake): "…we created him. Godzilla is in all of us…" More accurately, Godzilla might be said to be an extension of the eight-year-old child in all of us, always looking for another tower of blocks to knock over.

The Japanese need to give up. They need to do everyone a favor and just stop making movies. They obviously can't do it right or they'd have it down by now. Why? Why would you make this kind of movie and who would watch it? The old Godzilla movies were at least funny in their cheapness but I couldn't even laugh at this one and that's pretty bad. I would rather watch the bible channel than this crap that's just terrifying. If you took a handful of nails and scratched them repeatedly up and down a chalkboard you could have more fun than if you watched this foreign trash. In other words, do not support the creators of this 'movie', if you could call it that, by spending money on it.