The black-and-white original, fully restored for its fiftieth anniversary, with English subtitles in place of dubbing, and no trace of Raymond Burr, comes across predictably as crude, primitive, and ineffective, a grade-Z monster movie in any language. Those selfsame qualities, however, have their advantages in the special-effects department — the man in the lizard suit, the miniatures, the models, the toys — as against the limitless capabilities of latter-day CG effects. By leaving something to the imagination (a lot, actually), they implicitly leave space for the unimaginable — not a bad idea when contemplating an apocalypse. They leave something, in other words, to the intellect, so that the disaster remains a matter of speculation rather than just spectacle, and the viewer becomes an active collaborator rather than an aloof onlooker. Nor is it a bad idea to surround such a disaster with a buffer zone of laughability. (Always our best defense, if not our only.) The Japanese, needless to say, come by their dread of the H-bomb honestly. And in that respect a lumbering relic of the Jurassic era, roused from the ocean floor by nuclear tests, may be seen as the soul of discretion, an artist in diplomacy. With Akihiko Hirata, Momoko Kochi, Akira Takarada, and Takashi Shimura; directed by Ishiro Honda. (1954) — Duncan Shepherd