I could have accepted Godzilla just being bad. Unfortunately Gareth Edwards has created something much more painful. A solid, reasonably entertaining missed opportunity.

All the elements are here. You've got Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe and David Strathairn chewing the scenery in the way only genuinely excellent actors can, you've got a fantastic successor to Akira Ifukube's iconic score courtesy of Alexandre Desplat and you've got Godzilla looking and moving in ways you could only dream of before. Unfortunately, it just doesn't quite work.

The film starts very strong, the newsreel style recap of the original encounter with the beast run underneath the opening credits is an interesting and effective way of presenting the back story without resorting to having characters spouting exposition at the camera. A pity then that half an hour or so later, that's precisely what they're doing.

This is doubly frustrating because of how effectively the first act builds up the anticipation for the big reveal. The stuff set in the late 90s is perhaps the only interesting human drama in the entire picture, although the sequence leading up to the birth of the first MUTO works reasonably well too. It's all interesting and exciting while, quite deliberately, not about Godzilla. Having this anticipation dispelled not by the monster himself, but by a Ken Watanabe presenting a slide show is a real misstep.

The tone is also oddly inconsistent. Any comparisons to the original are way off, Edwards' film has little in common with Honda's classic, and falls more in line with other Legendary faux-realistic fare like Nolan's Batman films. Despite this the film is littered with B-movie concepts. No attempt is taken to provide a realistic take on the giant monsters, instead resorting to origins that wouldn't feel out of place in the likes of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. It creates a real clash with the straight faced nature of the rest of the picture, and the vaguely biomechanical looking nature of the MUTOs doesn't help, especially when it is never addressed and they're implied to be natural creatures.

These are minor niggles compared to biggest problem with the film, though. Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Ford is impossibly one dimensional and dull, and for the vast majority of the picture we're glued to his back. It's so bad that I have to wonder if he was always intended to be the protagonist. Comparatively minor characters like those played by Cranston and Watanabe feel much more flesh out and human and would have been significantly better suited to carry the picture.

In the end Ford basically becomes someone we can follow from action sequence to action sequence. In theory this may not be so bad. Having human characters being little more than onlookers isn't exactly new to the Godzilla franchise, and if he were just ours eyes through which to view the big guy it would have been forgiveable, but when the film is actually cutting away from Godzilla's fights to get back to this mannequin of a main character it becomes infuriating.

The film does wins back a lot of good will with the final act, with Godzilla finally getting his teeth, figuratively and literally, into the MUTOs. The fight scenes are phenomenal. Godzilla's movement and combat style is something really special. He's not just moving like a big animal, he gives the impression of personality and intelligence that so many CGI monsters lack and that Godzilla as a man in a rubber suit was never short of.

If it brings to mind anything it's the creatures of Ray Harryhausen, and that's high praise for any cinematic beast. The MUTOs provide a nice contrast and allow for much more interesting action sequences than had Godzilla been paired up with a more similar monster, as was so often the case in previous films.

All in all it's a good film that could have been great. A tighter script of perhaps even some harsher editing could have elevated it, but as it stands it's a hard one to recommend to anyone but diehard fans.