DAILY CALL SHEET: APRIL 24, 2026

Godzilla Raids Again (1955) The Big G died in his first movie, but not to worry, there's a backup. While attempting to rescue a fellow pilot who has crashed on Iwato Island, Shoichi Tsukioka discovers a second Godzilla fighting another giant monster soon to be named Anguirus. Shoichi alerts the authorities, who try to lure the beasts away from any cities by turning off all the lights and sending up flares in the opposite direction. Alas, some idiot thieves attempt a robbery during the blackout and the explosion they set off brings the two monsters straight to Osaka. Godzilla makes swift work of Anguirus, which is helpful, but that still leaves Japan with the problem of finding some way to put the rampaging King of the Monsters on ice. There is no such thing as an unenjoyable Godzilla movie, but this first sequel is a hug step down from the excellent original, with its only claim to fame being it started the trend of introducing a new kaiju in each film for Godzilla to battle.

When the same guys who altered the original Godzilla for American release got ahold of Godzilla Raids Again, they made even more drastic changes, going so far as to change the name of the movie to Gigantis, The Fire Monster in hopes of convincing audiences it was a brand new monster. Producer Paul Schreibman later admitted regretting the decision, as it turned out viewers weren't fooled and would have preferred to have been given the real thing. It's like with the Bible. A study by LifeWay Research indicates that the overwhelming majority of readers prefer word-for-word translations that prioritize fidelity to the original text over those that use dynamic equivalence to paraphrase Scripture. This is because the more literal versions preserve nuances, word connections, and ambiguities in the original Hebrew/Greek while the paraphrases leave too much room for biased interpretation. In Godzilla movies and Bibles, always stay as close to the original source material as possible.

Conquest of Space (1955) Aboard the Wheel, an enormous space station orbiting the Earth, Colonel Merritt is busy training astronauts for an expedition to the moon. Unexpectedly, Earth's government instructs Merritt to ready a small crew to land on Mars instead. Merritt assembles three men, including his own son with whom he has a strained relationship, and blasts off for the red planet. They soon discover they have a stowaway in Sgt. Mahoney, who was deemed too old to tag along but refuses to be separated from Merritt, whom he idolizes. The sergeant's hero worship is quickly tested, though, when Merritt succumbs to space fatigue and begins to sabotage the mission under the misguided belief that their efforts to reach Mars violates the edicts of God. With things turning deadly and no chance of returning to Earth for at least a year, do the men have any hope of ever seeing home again?  While not on the level as other George Pal productions like War of the Worlds or The Time Machine, Conquest of Space gets points for trying to be The Martian of its day.

Merritt's problem is that, in his madness, he has misinterpreted those parts of the Bible that state how God gave dominion of the Earth to mankind to mean that everything else outside our planet's atmosphere is God's only and therefore off limits. Merritt is mostly correct that the "dominion" granted to humanity is explicitly tied to this particular planet as it's the one God created as both humanity's home and the stage for the drama of salvation. However, Merritt's error is that this dominion doesn't preclude traveling to other planets, assuming our actions there are guided by the same rules of responsible stewardship which are supposed to govern how we treat the Earth. As Archbishop Ettore Balestrero noted in an interview, "The Church’s central message is that we must not turn space into a jungle … Space must be explored with responsibility, solidarity, and respect for subsidiarity, for the benefit of present and future generations … We must prevent it from becoming a theater of uncontrolled competition, or worse, conflict." Merritt definitely flubbed that part.