Godzilla

The bigger the better?

Sorry! No can do.

Shades of Pacific Rim cloud your judgement. Hollywood keeps forgetting that human content is as important as special effects.

And the human content here is as flat as a cat squished by the heel of one of the giant preying mantis.

Hey ho! Monsters vs homo sapiens - again. Like The War Of The Worlds, only on a grander scale.

The sea dragon, Godzilla, genetically altered by atom bomb tests, is back. In this age of 3-D and CGI, he sounds like the right monster at the right time. But he needs the protection of a good script and that's where this version goes wrong.

Corporate boffin (Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston) believes that there is more to the earthquakes in Japan than the suits care to admit. Fifteen years later, already out to grass, living alone with memories of his late wife, (Juliette Binoche in the shortest cameo role in the history of waste disposal) and his obsession with scientific evidence of creatures from the dark ocean, things happen to prove he's not entirely off his rocker.

His son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is an army bomb specialist with a pretty doctor wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and a five-year-old who doesn't do much, living in San Francisco.They say "I love you. Be safe" and "Love you, too." which indicates that they are nothing more appetising than corn custard.

It's the beast, or beasts - first you have the giant preying mantis and then you have Big Daddy himself who fights with the mantiis while destroying Honolulu and Las Vegas on the way - that you want to see.

It takes forever. Director Gareth Edwards believes, like Hitchcock, that no-see is more scary than yes-see. He holds back the first mantis until you feel that half the movie's gone, watching boring people - OK, boffin Cranston breaks better than most. Even when they make their appearance it's in semi-darkness, or clouded by spray/dust/low skies.

The politicians and navy chiefs are wood carvings. Our hero looks tense. His wife looks tenser. His dad looks frantic. His son looks confused. Godzilla looks pissed off with celebrity and wants to go back into hibernation.

Let him go.