This American re-edit of the original Japanese film was a hit in its time, but no one watches it today without marveling at its constant blunders. We’re talkin’ an Ed Wood level of clumsy here, minus the charm. Hollywood hadn’t yet figured out to just remake bankable foreign movies, so what they did here was take footage from the earlier film and then shove Raymond Burr in there as an American reporter who happens to pass through Tokyo when a giant radioactive lizard rises out of the ocean and stomps on everything. Burr mostly gives blank stares, shudders and often gazes with a concerned look on his face. He seems to have received minimal acting direction. He’s also forced to interact with characters from a two-year-old movie, which sometimes means bad back-and-forth one-shots between him and a Japanese cast whom he’s never met in his life. It also means the dreaded occasional stand-ins for the original actors who turn up just to show the back of their head and pantomime to overdubbed dialogue. And yep, there is a pasted-on voiceover from Burr—he sounds bored—to tie it all together.
The metaphor of Godzilla—he’s an atomic bomb, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki personified as a prehistoric beast reborn from mysterious radioactive magic—remains intact, but this survives the years as little more than a curiosity. See it for its badness.