Godzilla

Gareth Edwards made Monsters (2010) by keeping his creatures at the edge of the frame and pointing the camera at the people looking at them. He does the same thing here with the most famous creature in cinema, on a scale his first film could only gesture at. Godzilla is a patient film, close to a slow one, and it holds its title character back for most of its 123 minutes. When it lets go, in the last half hour, it is as good as this sort of thing gets. Getting there means spending a lot of time with people that Max Borenstein’s screenplay has not bothered to write.

The opening is the strongest stretch of story the film has. Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) runs a nuclear plant on the Japanese coast in 1999, tremors arrive that should not be there, and the plant comes down around him. Cranston plays the fifteen years that follow as a man who has not slept properly since, jabbing at charts in a flat papered with cuttings, and he is the only actor here given something to want. The wig he does it under has been much remarked on and deserves to be. Juliette Binoche, as his wife Sandra, has perhaps three scenes and makes them count.

The trouble is who the film hands the story to afterwards. Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Ford is a Navy bomb-disposal officer, which is a useful thing to be in a film that ends up needing one, and that is the whole of his character. The script moves him from Japan to Hawaii to San Francisco because it needs a face at each stop, and Taylor-Johnson supplies a face. Elizabeth Olsen, as his wife Elle, spends the film in a hospital waiting for a phone to ring. Ken Watanabe’s Serizawa stares at things with his mouth slightly open while Sally Hawkins’s Dr Graham explains them to him, and David Strathairn’s Admiral Stenz gives orders that nobody in the audience believes will work.

The craft is another story. Seamus McGarvey shoots almost everything through something: smoke, rain, the window of a train, the visor of a gas mask, a television screen in a departure lounge. The monsters are lit by flares and lightning and the fires they have started, so we see a flank, a tail, a jaw, and are left to put the rest together. Owen Paterson’s quarantine zone is a town with the 1999 calendars still on the walls and the plant behind it gutted to its ribs. Alexandre Desplat’s score keeps to low brass and drums and leaves the roar to the sound department, which is the right decision.

Bob Ducsay’s editing is the film’s most argued-over choice, and we argued with it ourselves. The first monster fight, at Honolulu airport, is glimpsed on a news report as a hospital door swings shut. We laughed, and then we were annoyed, and then we saw the point: Edwards wants us hungry. It works for two withholdings. By the third we had stopped admiring the restraint and started checking our watch.

Then the soldiers jump. A team drops from an aircraft into black cloud over San Francisco with red flares trailing from their ankles, a Ligeti requiem on the soundtrack, and the city below lit only by what is burning, and we sat forward and did not sit back until the credits. The fight that follows is staged at night in dust and fog, with Godzilla a shape more often than a body, and it earns every one of the shots the film refused us earlier. There is a moment in it that fans of the older films have waited a long time for, and Edwards makes them wait until the last possible second.

Ishirō Honda’s original, in 1954, was about the bomb. This one says the word Hiroshima once and moves on. Edwards’s Monsters was a film about two people with a creature behind them; this is a film about a creature with people left in front of it by accident. Most critics have split roughly down the middle, and for once that seems about right.

See it on the largest screen you can find with the sound turned up, because at home the fog is only fog and the man in the foreground is only a man. It carries a 12A, and the certificate is earned by dread rather than blood.