10 Awesome Things In The Best Summer Movie Season Ever‏

6. An Actual Monster - Godzilla

The Scene: The jury's still out on whether Gareth Edwards succeeded in Hollywood's second attempt at bringing a Japanese legend to American audiences, but one thing's for certain - he got the monster right. It's been a heck of a long time since we saw a proper giant monster on the screen. Well, there was Pacific Rim, but that hardly counts. And Cloverfield a few years before that, but we didn't see a whole lot of the monster in that, and when we did it looked like an overgrown daddy long legs. To get some really classic American kaiju you have to go all the way back to the B-movies of the fifties, with the giant ants of Them! and the like. The rest of the film was a little iffy, but Edwards got Godzilla exactly right: a hulking, unwieldy behemoth, an evolutionary misstep, a natural disaster in the form of a lizard the size of a skyscraper. Why It's Awesome: We still get chills thinking about the glimpses we got of Godzilla, and the snippets of his iconic scream, in the trailers during the build up to this film's release. It may have set expectations too high in general - and also hinted that Bryan Cranston would have a much bigger role than he actually did - but one thing that didn't disappoint us was Godzilla himself. In Roland Emmerich's failed 1998 version, the monster was an underwhelming T-Rex analogue; Edwards gave us a Godzilla even more monstrous than the Japanese original, a frighteningly overwhelming beast who dominates the landscape and slowly advances through crumbling cityscapes like it ain't no thang. We never thought we'd be so scared of a dude in a rubber suit.