A real sweet take on Godzilla (watched the dubbed version - not sure if there is an English subtitled one as I prefer subtitles).

The action starts quickly and maintains a furious pace initially.

Military action scenes, cityscapes and some pretty awesome EFX (some very unique EFX blending made this fun).

Premise is simple. A creature is rampaging through Japan. How will Japan stop it.

I felt the movie bogged down when it begins to get preachy about a few subjects as well as when they tried to develop the characters:

1 - Radioactivity is bad. A quick cut to Hiroshima destruction was thrown in for good measure in case anyone has forgotten.
2 - Bureaucracy is bad, especially when stuck in old ways of thinking. Get advice from your counsels and then ignore them because you know better.
3 - Decision-making (mostly bad). It takes ten people to rely a message when attendees all sitting at the same table (I am exaggerating but after this happened multiple times, it was painful to see).
4 - USA is bad, then good, then bad.
5 - Apparently if you do not have a title in Japan you are basically cannon fodder and should shut up. The movie tried to make the 3 women characters in this strong but this backfired.

There must be some Japanese cultural issues and statements going on in this flick that I didn't understand.

Removing some of the bloat and tightening the movie up to focus on the creature stopping mobilizations and the cityscape shots with Godzilla in the middle creating chaos would have been spectacular.

Godzilla was bad in this one, but the movie characters tried to make Godzilla out to be the victim. This was head-scratching for me as the destruction was massive.

The Godzilla appearance at first was puzzling to me as I thought I was watching an anime version of the creature. Fortunately, I didn't turn the movie off at this time, but I was close.

A final shot, set this one up for a potential sequel.