The film starts off strong with action right from the get-go.  The submarine/airship Gotengo engages in a very short battle against Godzilla at the South Pole, trapping him underneath an avalanche of ice a la Godzilla Rides Again.  The credits roll and then we see an underwater fight against the monster Manda.  Pretty cool stuff.

Then the plot starts, and the movie commences it's down hill slide.

We are introduced to the "M Organization" a mutant filled squad in the Earth Defense Force (EDF), and their spunky member Ozaki (Masahiro Matsuoka).  What sets these people apart from ordinary humans, aside from having a certain gene, isn't disclosed, but these men and women practice Kung Fu diligently, which is sure to help them in their battle against giant monsters.

Things start looking up when several monsters attack various cities around the globe, just like in Destroy All Monsters.  The M Organization takes on Ebirah in Tokyo and manage to kill him with hand held weapons.  Other armies using tanks and war ships don't have as much luck though, and things are looking bad until an alien space ship captures all of the monsters and saves the Earth.  These aliens (the Xians, in a nod to the old Planet X) claim that they want to be our friends, but in reality they just want to eat humans.  They are able to control all of the monsters because they have the M gene.  They ordered the monsters to attack the Earth just so they could save it.  As the commander says, it's better to do things peacefully if possible.  I can only assume that he thinks humans will be so grateful for being spared that they'll cover their bodies in tasty sauces hoping to be the first ones eaten.

That plan falls apart when, after a long and boring investigation, the M Organization discovers some duplicity among the alien delegation that's interacting with the UN.  The alien "X" kills his leader and takes control of the mission.  No more peaceful solutions for him!  He takes control of all of M Organization with his telepathic powers (with the exception of Ozaki) and releases the monsters that they've captured on the world.  The EDF's forces are totally wiped out, and it looks like Earth is doomed.

Wiped out except for one ship that didn't fight the monsters for some reason: the Gotengo.  Ozaki and Captain Gordon (Don Frye, Ultimate Fighting Championship star) take the ship and reawaken Godzilla.  The plan is to let G! fight the other monsters and aliens, and then bury him in ice again.  Will the newly awakened Godzilla be able to defeat all of the other monsters in the world and an alien invasion force?  They don't call him king of the monsters for nothing.

This film was directed by Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus), who is described on Toho's web site as "the hottest Japanese filmmaker in Hollywood."  I'm not sure what that means since he hasn't directed a Hollywood movie and none of his movies have been made into Hollywood productions like Ringu. It sounds like faint praise at best.  In this film Kitamura loses sight of what makes Godzilla movies so fun, namely Godzilla.  The monster fights at the end of the movie are painfully brief, with some of the fights appearing on background monitors on the alien space ship.  Other monster scenes are interrupted by inane throw away scenes such as the one where a pimp pulls a gun on a New York cop for towing his car.  (The cop's reaction?  He doesn't take having a gun aimed at his face seriously and tell the guy to put it away with a bored expression.  Riiiight.)  I was happy that he included so many monsters, but none of them had very much screen time.  And why oh why did he have to bring back baby Godzilla and give him more screen time than Gihdorah???  The focus during the whole film was the M squad and how they fought the aliens, not on Godzilla.  This is more of a SF movie than a Godzilla film.

The plot was pretty incoherent and full of holes.  The aliens could control all of the monsters except Godzilla and Mothra?  Why?  They could control all of the mutants too, except for Ozaki because he was a "kaiser" whatever the hell that means.  Okay....  And what was that hunter doing wearing a badger skin, and where was he taking Minilla?  Why?  If the aliens wanted to use humans as food why did they try to kill everyone on the planet?  The list goes on and on.

The dialog was horribly poor too, and I don't think you can just chalk it up to a bad translation.  Nothing that came out of anyone's mouth sounded like a sentence a real person would say.   Ozaki  once asks someone:  "Are you really a biologist?  You look more like a model to me." Smooth talker that one is.  The alien commander gets a good laugh when he says "He who relies solely on power soon finds that power turned against him."  Okay old wise master.  Just what in the hell does that mean??

Ryuhei Kitamura also lifts a lot from a movie not in the Godzilla cannon.  It's a rare and little scene film, so he probably thought that no one would notice.  He was wrong though, there are a few people who have seen The Matrix, and they will instantly recognize several scenes.  I could let the 'camera spinning around a couple fighting in the air' go (although it's a very trite and dated technique now) and I only smiled as slow motion bullets whizzed past people who were able to dodge them, but when Ozaki stops laser blasts in mid air (the more I think about that the more stupid it becomes) I had to laugh.  What was he thinking??

On the plus side there were some entertaining fights, though they were often brief.  I didn't mind when the American Godzilla (a CGI creation that looked pretty bad by the way) was trashed in under a minute, but when Godzilla faces Rhodan, Anguirus, and King Caesar all at once, you want the battle to last more than two or three minutes.
 
When all is said and done, this movie had too much wire-fu and not enough monster-fu.

This disc has both the original Japanese and an English dub of the movie, both in 5.1.  The audio for both tracks was outstanding.  Though I didn't care for the background music, the quality of the sound reproduction was excellent as was the use of the soundstage.  This was a film that really worked all of the speakers, even in the scenes that didn't involve fights.  Sound effects an music come from all corners of the room, and really immersed the viewer.  The sound was crisp and tight and added a lot to the movie.

I didn't really care for the dub job on this film though.  I'm not a subtitle snob, and I have enjoyed the dubs on other Godzilla movies and in anime, but this one was only mediocre.  The voice talent didn't really act as well as I was hoping, and the voices didn't really fit the actor's faces.  The whole dub track just seemed a little more cheesy than the movie did in Japanese.
 

Video:

The widescreen (2.40:1) anamorphic video was also very good.  There were a lot of scenes that played with color and lighting, opening the camera lens a little bit more than it should to give the image a washed out look and applying various gels to the lights, that gave the film a unique look.  These were all reproduced nicely, with the colors being strong and the flesh tones accurate.  The blacks were solid, and the level of detail very good.  Digital defects were at a minimum with nothing really worth mentioning.  This is a very good looking disc.

Extras:

There is only one bonus item, but it's a very good one: an 18-minute reel of raw B unit footage.  This was really entertaining and showed what it looks like when they film the guys in the rubber suits fighting.  They intercut the raw footage with the finished film.  It was interesting to hear the director yell "On your mark" in English before the filming starts, something that I didn't know they did.

Final Thoughts:

As a science fiction movie, this wasn't too bad.  A little cheesy and with a lot of plot holes and bad dialog, but there was still a lot of fun parts to it.  As a Godzilla movie though, it doesn't make the mark.  Godzilla is almost an afterthought in this film, and there is way too much time spent with the M Organization fighting the aliens.  Toho has stated that this is going to be the last Godzilla film (we've heard that before though, haven't we) and I was hoping for more from this final effort.  The monster fights are brief, but good, and it is a lot of fun picking out the various monsters and trying to name the movies that they've appeared in.  For that reason, this disc is Recommended for fans of the franchise.  Casual viewers are advised to rent it tough, or better yet check out Tokyo SOS.