Rating: NR
Genres: Action Science Fiction
Release Date: 01/27/2004
SubTitles: English/French
Dubbed: English/Japanese
Sound: DD5.1
Run Time: 105 min
Distributor/Studio: Columbia TriStar

After sandblasting away years of camp and bad scripts from the Gamera franchise to form a couple of tight-scripted, vastly entertaining flicks, Shusuke Kaneko gives the same treatment to the granddaddy of kaiju eiga characters: Godzilla. The film opens with Godzilla waking up from his underwater hideaway. Unseen since his 1954 attack on Tokyo, the monster is spotted by a Japanese submarine. Though government officials seem reluctant to confront the problem, Navy Admiral Tachibana (Ryudo Uzaki), who witnessed the rampage when he was a child, is more than a little alarmed. Meanwhile, Tachibana's daughter Yuri (Chiharu Niiyama), who works at a struggling TV station, is making a documentary in the mountains of Niigata Prefecture. One night, they experience a massive earthquake and that next morning they learn that a gang of motorcycle punks were crushed in a mountain tunnel and witnesses reportedly saw some sort of fire-breathing creature in the rubble. Later, a group of campers in southern Kagoshima prefecture are crushed by some Thing that crawled out of Lake Ikeda. Soon Japan is awash with monsters -- including Baradon, a monster that looks like a pug terrier with Mickey Mouse ears, and King Gidora, a three-headed beast with a lethal 50-meter tail -- busting up things north, south, east, and west.

~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

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