Shin Godzilla, the new movie opening today is amazing for two reasons: one good, one bad. The bad first:  It skips entirely 60 years of continually advancing plotting, script writing, special effects and subtitling from the Japanese. As if none of these had advanced at all in six decades. It is beyond execrable, such that you cannot figure out what lost segment of audience could possibly be interested in wasting 2 hours of their life to sit through this spectacle of blow-up "dragon" with untenable dentition, little stupid front vestigial limbs with dopey fragile clawed hands at the ends that look powerfully like Obama's when he  bounces down airplane steps and his hands are up in supplicatory and feminine rabbit pose.

The new incarnation of Godzilla never changes expression, even when the entire Japanese air assault team tosses artillery, missiles, Scud batteries and bombs, and the US Air Force explodes bunker buster bombs.

Sure, he emits radiation and fire, but all that requires is him opening his cavernous mouth and the magic effects guys send out a ridiculous laser river of roiling flames. His eyes are gimlets. His demeanor is unperturbed, overall. He jes' keeps grimacing as he sashays slowly over the landscape.

Full disclosure: They bribed us at the critics’ screening with drinks and flavored popcorn, mighty Gojira T-shirts, and a poster for our sitting room walls. And an after-party at the nearby swanky Hilton, where you hit the lobby on floor 15.

The best thing about the film, the only thing that gives one pause, is the metaphorical heft of adult Japanese pleading with the prime minister replacement to toss the works, including a megaton bomb, at this radiation menace from the sea. There's something vaguely creepy about the Duma desperate to destroy Gojira (pronouncing it with a Japanese accent) by replicating the single most destructive event of recent Japanese history.

Now for the good reason Shin Godzilla is amazing.  In their terror at the wavy-tailed big bruiser messing with the municipal infrastructure, the muckamucks advise bringing in the United States and their might to conquer this scaly-skinned radiator, and agree to be sort of a vassal state to the eradicator of the yuuge lizard with the unreliable smile. Here's one country that mistakenly still considers us the master of the skies and the dominant military of the globe. Nice to think someone still does, after these past dispiriting eight years.