What I wanted to watch this week was “Gojira,” the original Japanese Godzilla movie from 1954. The only problem with Gojira is that it's a subtitled movie, and we watch our creature features with my little daughter. Subtitles are not her thing. So we reluctantly watched “Godzilla, King of the Monsters” instead, the rather odd American version of the same movie.

Why is it odd? Because they didn't just dub it over- in fact, they didn't dub it at all. Instead they shot some completely arbitrary new scenes featuring an American character for the American audience to relate to. Since he wasn't in the original movie, he doesn't really have anything to do. So he just stands there smoking his pipe and telling you what the Japanese characters are saying in the other scenes. It is an exceedingly strange and pointless framing device, so I'm not going to say any more about it. Instead I'll just focus on the parts of the American version that come from the original Japanese version.

Those parts are very cool. Given the limitations on what could be accomplished with 1954 special effects, and given the inherent silliness of a movie about a four hundred foot tall “dinosaur” awakened by the H-bomb, this movie is surprisingly serious, dark, and anxious. It's not the same kind of movie as the sequels, which are monster vs monster kids' stuff. “Godzilla” is a movie about nuclear terror, and a feeling of approaching doom by forces too huge to resist. Other than the atrocious chop job the American distributor did on it, this is one of the best creature features we've seen so far.