Gargantua, a 1998 TV movie that aired the very night that the American Godzilla film of that year first hit advance theaters, is not the kind of monster film you might be expecting. If nothing else, the film certainly had good timing -- capitalizing on the hoopla and buildup of Godzilla before anyone had a chance to see the blockbuster film and be disappointed.

Gargantua himself is, at best, a cousin to Godzilla -- he's basically a salamander that got totally juiced on huge amounts of pesticides some company dumped into the ocean. Gargantua does walk on two legs, but he doesn't breathe fire, rampage all over man and his creations just for the heck of it, or go looking for a fight. The whole Gargantua family was just minding its own business, totally out of sight of man, until some seismic activity opened up a trench between its home and the nearby island of Malau.

Marine biologist Jack Ellway (Adam Baldwin) and his son have come to Malau to study the effects of recent earthquakes on local marine life. The last thing Ellway expected to find was a 9-foot lizard emerging from the sea and scaring everyone on the island. While he and another scientist attempt to study this magnificent creature, Ellway's son Brandon (Emile Hirsch) finds and befriends an incredibly cute baby Gargantua. Brandon keeps the little guy a secret, fearing that the adults (especially a local jerk hoping to get rich and -- of course -- the military) would hurt and probably kill him.

Of course, it's hard to keep a baby dinosaur a secret when increasingly humongous relatives come looking for him.

This is not a "monster terrorizing the island" movie. I'm not saying a few innocent humans don't get killed, but no Gargantua really ever attacks anyone. The same cannot be said for the humans, though, leading to one particularly sad moment in the film. I could go on a rant about who the real monster is, but I won't (the answer is man, by the way).

The movie would probably get higher ratings if it had the monster stomping and smashing his way through everything in its way, but Gargantua isn't just some hulking menace hell-bent on destruction. Personally, I thought the movie was pretty good, especially for a TV movie, and I especially liked how it painted the "monster" as both a victim and a magnificent animal deserving a chance to survive on this earth.