Ah, summer. The trees are blooming, the sun is shining, and a nasty-ass giant lizard is beating the crap out of New York City.

That's right. After a long year of teaser trailer after teaser trailer, "less is more" posters, and clues as to just how massive this creature is ("His tail is as long as John Holmes's member"), GODZILLA has landed in our nation's theaters. And what a mighty THUD it will produce. With a key Tuesday night premiere spot and a gazillion advertising dollars behind it, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's latest disasterpiece is poised to make enough money in its opening weekend (and beyond) to buy God.

Should your money go into their pockets, too? HELL, YEAH. Emmerich and Devlin have just about perfected their plunder-and-reboot approach to moviemaking with GODZILLA. It's a near-flawless example of THE SUMMER EVENT MOVIE, precisely what your brain has ordered for the dreamy middle months.

If you can believe it, Emmerich and Devlin have actually grown as artists. With "Independence Day," the production-screenwriting-direction duo tore chunks from every sci-fi blockbuster you can imagine and reassembled the pieces into a bit of a mess. Character interactions were meaningless, the talky scenes dragggggggggggggggged, and though the destruction and fighting were impressive, there was far too little of it. By the time Bill Pullman gave his snoozer of a speech proclaiming the alien ass-kicking an "Independence Day for...the...entire...world," you most likely found yourself pleading for independence from the theater seat.

No more boring talky stuff. GODZILLA is nearly wall-to-wall action. Sure, there's the hackneyed ex-lovers (Matthew Broderick and Maria Pitillo) falling back into each other's arms, and there's the stodgy news anchor who gets what's coming to him (Harry Shearer, grossly underused). But just when you think there's too much yakkin' and pretendin' to be a REAL movie goin' on, Godzilla shows up and tears apart a few buildings before slithering back to his lair beneath Madison Square Garden. They provide just enough character development to believably support the endless cliches, then get back to letting the Big Iguana rip up the Big Apple.

Oh, yeah...the plot. The French create a monster accidentally while they test nukes. (Damn the French! We bail their asses out in WWII, and THIS is how they repay us?!) This monster, GODZILLA, swims to NYC to lay eggs. The U.S. military spends half the movie blowing up buildings in vain attempts to kill the monster, while Broderick runs around with members of the French secret service (led by Jean Reno) trying to destroy the monster's eggs. The big guy lays about 200 baby Godzillas in Madison Square Garden, all of which hatch and start running around chasing the good guys because they smell like fish, and for whatever reason, nuclear-spawned creatures like to eat fish, as opposed to uranium or young children. Our military blows up Madison Square Garden, then murders Godzilla, but not before Broderick has the chance to actually share a meaningful moment of moving sorrow with the creature. Godzilla dies, good guys live. End. Now go home and wait for "Armageddon."

It's a good thing that Devlin and Emmerich concentrate on action and special effects, because the plot and characters are beyond derivative. GODZILLA is essentially "Jurassic Park" and "Aliens" mixed together, with a smidge of "The Lost World" thrown in for good measure. (Actually, GODZILLA is what "The Lost World" should have been: a bad-ass dinosaur ripping apart a city. Fifteen minutes of a T-rex stomping around a San Francisco suburb is NOTHING compared to two hours of Godzilla demolishing New York.) You can spot the blatant steals from the last row of the theater: there's the moment of wonder and awe when the monster is first engaged, the thrilling chase scene where the monster runs after an automobile, and even the shot of the water rippling from the impact of the monster's footsteps. When the baby Godzillas start to run around Madison Square Garden, two of the characters crawl into the overhead air ducts to escape them, a direct swipe from "Aliens." And no giant monster movie would be complete without the melancholy shot of the creature being slaughtered, his eyes flooded with agony, pleading for an understanding that we cold-hearted, selfish humans cannot offer.

The excessive plot derivativity (is that a word? IT IS NOW!) can at times lead to boredom. Why waste forty minutes on the "destroying baby Godzillas" subplot when you've just spent over an hour capturing the audience's imagination with a grown-up, angry-as-all-hell Godzilla? Mayor Ebert is funny, but did we need to watch him argue with the military commander time and again? There are pieces of the script that could have easily been tossed, streamlining the movie considerably. With a two hour, twenty minute running time, it could use a bit of streamlining, THAT'S for sure ("His movie's as long as five sitcoms").

Yet when all is said, done, and stomped into pieces, the bits from other movies in GODZILLA are assembled in such a way that attention is drawn away from the plot and characters, and toward the massive behemoth itself. For those looking for meaning in their movies, this is a bad thing. For those who don't mind copycat screenwriting in the name of high- octane destruction, all can be forgiven. The special effects are top-notch, the performances aren't awful, and when the beast is felled by a barrage of missiles in the movie's final moments, you'll be misting a bit, in spite of yourself.

If you want, you can be cynical and glare down your nose at GODZILLA and other summer films of its ilk. But if you do, you'll be missing a pretty decent time at the theater. Devlin and Emmerich have done NOTHING new with GODZILLA. They deserve no credit for originality. However, they do deserve tons of credit for knowing what their audience wants, and giving it to them in spades. When it comes to mindless summer movie madness and vivid scenes of destruction, GODZILLA delivers, with a mighty roar of nasty atomic breath.