I'm not a special effects aficionado. I don't see what was so bad about the Star Wars prequels, or what was so impressive about Avatar. I look at them like a means to an end, always keeping in mind the opening chorus of Henry V as far as that goes. As long as I have an idea what is supposed to be happening, I'm fine with it. And I watched almost a dozen of the old Godzilla movies when I was a kid, renting every one they had at the video store. And the Godzilla franchise was never a series of action or disaster films, or at least that's not why fans like me watched it. The plots are not mere excuses for Godzilla to trash a city, because the best Godzilla movies are not about trashing a city. That was why the Mathew Broderick piece of crap failed. It was more of an attempt to cash in on Jurassic Park than reboot the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla was only the name used to camouflage that intent, and an excuse to abandon even Jurassic Park's limited attempts at scientific verisimilitude.

The real raison d'etre of Godzilla movies was to watch Godzilla kick other monsters' asses!

Mission accomplished.

The only weakness here was that they did spend too long setting things up and there was not enough monster-on-monster action, but I'm pretty sure that if there was any more than we saw, people would be sneering that it's a glorified cartoon (but if you borrow the plot of Fern Gully for a glorified cartoon, you get Oscar nominations ). But I thought the human story was a nice framing and exposition device to explain the motivations for the monsters, establish the stakes for the humans, and do away with a number of tropes of the genre. The fates of the father and son protagonists both bucking the usual cliches for this sort of thing. Much better use for the humans that running around hoping Godzilla will save them, and an adequate cover and setting was provided for the monster fight, which is all you need the humans to do. Did we need to know why the admiral was so dead set on his courses of action? No, because Giant Monsters is a fairly self-explanatory motivation. The usual route for these films is to have a scientist in his late 20s or early 30s save the day in some absurd fashion, and/or have the military deploy some superweapon to help/stop Godzilla. In this one, what the humans could do, they did, and it was done by military professionals, whom one would presume would be the natural choice to do such things (an element I felt was underrated or overlooked in the Transformers movies, as well as stifled by the Spielbergian influence: i.e. Shia Lebeouf's character).

For Godzilla fans, I think this will be a pleasant surprise (there have been several movies since 1998, including an American wide-spread theatrical release, so we are not simply relieved to have the old look back, thank you).

If they need Xmen to save it, we're doomed. The concept is already flawed, and in execution, the films have not been impressive. I strongly disliked the last two, and the Wolverine movies, and even the first Xmen could have been a lot better. The regular series of Marvel movies are much better, even the tiresome Iron Man trilogy, which is only saved by the actor.