Just came back from seeing it. I tried to keep my expectations low, because I figured movies that have tons of hype and awesome trailers often tend to be huge letdowns. Fortunately, it wasn't the case this time, and it ended up far surpassing my lowered expectations.

********** SPOILERS AHEAD **********

The ''chaos, destruction and confusion'' scenes were pretty damn awesome. The movie masterfully put you right in the middle of the kaiju apocalypse, and almost made you feel like you were there. I also LOVED how they didn't go about explaining everything about the monster : FINALLY a Hollywood flick that gets the fact that the unknown and the mysterious are way scarier than the meticulously overexplained.

But even though I really enjoyed the movie overall, I'm gonna post my nitpicky complaints anyway, if only to provide some balance to the unabashed lovefest

First, I was getting pretty tired of the ''normal life'' intro. I was starting to fear that, now that I knew what bland lame-asses the characters were, I was going to be less interested in what happened to them once the shit hit the fan. And to a certain extent, that did happen (especially when they went on a moronic quest to find a probably-already-dead girl instead of trying to save themselves). But the sheer awesomeness of the monster attack scenes quickly made me forget that.

Also, the very end was pretty unsatisfying. I know it fit with the realistic tone and all, but for a movie of that type I was expecting something more unexpected, shocking and cleverly thought out.

Finally, the monster itself was kinda generic-looking. I wanted something more weird and freaky-looking (that ''multy-finned whale with legs'' drawing that was making the rounds would have been much better IMHO). Plus, they showed a bit too much of it, and a bit too clearly (especially near the end). And finally, it's size seemed really inconsistent : in some scenes it looked almost as large as Godzilla, and in others he looked a mere 30 feet tall.

But the overall greatness of the panic and destruction scenes was enough to make me forget these grievances, and overall I'm very pleased with the movie. Although it'll probably lose a lot of it's impact with repeated viewings, or on the small screen.