George Forss and I went to Vermont tonight to see “Godzilla,” Gareth Edward’s gazillion dollar monster of a monster movie. We both loved it.

Before the movie started, George and I each drew our cameras to take a photo of the other. I won the draw. It is hard not wonder at the cost, complexity, noise and mayhem of the contemporary blockbuster American movie, it is a monument to wretched  capitalist excess. Everything about this movie is too large, too loud, too long.

The star, Godzilla, doesn’t even make an appearance until the movie is an hour old, and while that definitely built suspense and added to the impact, it felt at times that he was the best actor in the film. No one else was memorable in any way, unless there is an Oscar for meaningful glances of grim portent. The monster is, in fact, the most likeable figure in the film.

But given all of that – I fear for simple and beautiful film, I guess they will all end up on TV – I thought Edward’s struggled bravely to re-think the Godzilla story, never very complex and re-cast it in a creative way. The monster was fabulous, beautifully and convincingly rendered and the special effects were gorgeous, an art form all of it’s own. Some of the scenes were just spectacular. Godzilla made a late but dramatic entrance, and Edwards wisely shot his battle scenes in the rain and darkness, leaving something to our imagination – the hallmark of the true scary movie.

it is true that Godzilla is perhaps the best rendered monster in modern cinematic history – I can’t say I’ve seen them all.

This movie was not scary, not for a second, except for the few moments after Godzilla comes out of the ocean to wreak havoc and roar that piercing roar (more like a scream).  We all know how gazillion dollar movies have to end, people don’t spend hundreds of million dollars on a movie that ends badly, even if half of the country in in smoldering ruins.

Godzilla has lots of testosterone, his very emergence from the water causes tidal waves.

The original movie touched a particularly deep chord because it came out of postwar Japan, still the only country to have nuclear bombs dropped on its civilian population.  It was clearly meant as a cautionary tale, a warning to the world about nuclear power. This new Godzilla also takes a stab at warning us about the threat of nuclear power and the catastrophe a nuclear war would be.

But the mostly subliminal antiwar messages in the movie seem contrived, they are flat and heavy-handed given that most of the film is a commercial for the Armed Forces and involves spectacular theatrics by the military on land and sea blasting away at everything that moves and many things that don’t. As in most of the big action movies, conventional military power doesn’t cut it, the forces of evil are way too powerful. We do get to see a lot of jazzy computer and tracking software and graphics.

In the end, it is not military or nuclear power that triumphs, but old fashioned John Wayne bravado. There are plenty of brave soldiers, but it is not a bomb that turns the tide.

Godzilla is cast as a hero in Edward’s view, and I was not as fond of the two mutant monsters the big monster battled and who helped him trample San Francisco and Honolulu to oblivion. They were not as well rendered.  They looked like some hellish cross between a spider and a bat and they had about as much character and personality as a road marker. If loudness could kill, Godzilla would not have lasted a minute. And Godzilla, it turns out, was a lot louder. And you can’t ask why he doesn’t pick on someone his own size.

Once the movie gets going, there is enough mayhem and destruction to make any 14-year-old boy happy, and we are all at the mercy of their tastes when it comes to big movies. Am I the only person, I wonder, who finds it painful to see our cities destroyed in film after film?  Movies like Godzilla are an assault on the senses, but George and I still have the child within us and we both came out of the movie talking about how much we liked it. “They sure know what they are doing,” said George, “that movie just kept on coming.” There are good reasons not to like the movie – the human acting is wooden and dull, the movie is too long, there are about a million more screaming people in the movie than we need to get the point and I will never understand why movie Generals and Admirals don’t seem to know they can’t shoot a monster the size of the Empire State Building with rifles. It just never seems to work.

But still, it was great fun and this is not a movie to give anybody nightmares (headaches maybe). If you love special effects, Edwards has taken them to another level.