The OG (Original Godzilla) is back -- with all that implies. Compared to the 1998 American monster movie, Godzilla 2000 is at once far cooler and far cheesier.

Lest fans forget that genuine Toho Godzilla movies aren't exactly Shakespeare, the new film is a return to everything that makes a real Godzilla epic. Guys in rubber suits, vast devastation, Japanese sentimentality, forgettable human characters, bad translation, and cool ideas obscured by primitive effects and absurd premises.

Toho stock character -- reckless girl reporter Yuki Ichinose (Naomi Nishida) -- accompanies them the night Godzilla rises from the deep to terrorize a small town and attack a power station. Our heroes rush right into the path of danger, confront the thing head on and miraculously escape.

If you can recover from having your eyes rolled all the way back into your head, the rest of the movie proceeds as you might expect. Seems the GPN is at odds on a regular basis with the Crisis Control Intelligence Agency (CCI), the government department that deals with things like giant monsters, alien spacecraft and the like.

Of course, the CCI is only interested in destroying Godzilla -- the cads -- while the GPN takes the much more "reasonable" approach of wanting to study the beast despite the fact he regularly murders thousands during his regular commute to Tokyo. Call me callous, but the idea of trying to protect this immense threat to human life strikes me as just slightly irresponsible. But maybe that's just me.

At any rate, the egomaniac director of the CCI has discovered a massive meteorite at the bottom of the north Pacific, and dispatches a team to raise it. But the meteor has ideas of its own, ideas that lead to an alien spaceship landing atop the downtown Tokyo newspaper offices of our girl reporter, to the memorable chagrin of her editor.

Computers are central to the alien's plans, most of which is extrapolated by our heroes from scant evidence and guesswork, and, by extension, the larger plot. "Godzilla vs. the Millennium Bug" is the obvious theme that's not fully developed here, along with "Godzilla vs. Cloning" and "Godzilla vs. the Power Company." It's all happily forgotten as the monster rumble gears up for the final "ironic" showdown.

The effects throughout are a mixed bag. The filmmakers courageously attempt to blend Godzilla into footage of real settings from a variety of angles you wouldn't have seen in a '60s-era monster bash. We see an aerial shot of Godzilla wading through a real river, a CGI Godzilla swimming, and ambitiously but ineffectively, Godzilla wading ashore on a real beach. The shots of Godzilla's flame breath revving up before blasting out are extremely cool though, and are almost worth the price of admission.

Western audiences will chuckle or laugh outright at the sentimental finale, and the bad dialog that frames it. But if you can't get a good laugh out of a Godzilla movie, what's the point?