Just when we thought we had our eyes filled with BIG MONSTER fix (with some big ass robots thrown in for good measures) in last years “Pacific Rim”, Warner Brothers and Legendary Films are back at it again with GODZILLA.

Gareth Edwards directs GODZILLA, which stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Kick-Ass”), Oscar® nominee Ken Watanabe (“The Last Samurai,” “Inception”), Elizabeth Olsen (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Oscar® winner Juliette Binoche (“The English Patient,” “Cosmopolis”), and Sally Hawkins (“Blue Jasmine”), with Oscar® nominee David Strathairn (“Good Night, and Good Luck.,” “The Bourne Legacy”) and Bryan Cranston (“Argo,” TV’s “Breaking Bad”).

After an oddly…oddly… really oddly paced first act, GODZILLA picks itself up about 40 minutes in, thanks to some “Spielberg-rian” strong influences and ridiculous “best you can buy” special effects.

But, instead of having money shots after money shots from minute one, director Gareth Edwards (“Monsters,” if you haven’t seen it, stop reading this, go to Netflix, watch the movie… then come back) decided to use the type of suspense mastered by Spielberg in “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park” (and if you haven’t seen those two what are you doing reading this anyway?), instead of giving into the temptation that most directors do showing everything right away, just because you can.

In a recent interview Edwards said, “I probably blame it on growing up with movies like the early Spielberg films. (Those movies) had for me what was like this holy grail of filmmaking. You’d find these characters who are relatable, everyday folk that get put in these extreme situations through the events that happen in the movie. So I was aspiring to do something more akin to that late ‘70s/early ‘80s style of filmmaking.”

Amen. This not only helped to give the audience better and bigger set pieces you can actually look forward to, anticipate and follow (“Man Of Steel” anyone?), but it also helped give much needed “groundedness” to the human characters. Even if some characters unfortunately had little, to nothing to do with the actual plot, this restrain at least allowed for the real main star to be enjoyed in every second (or every frame) he was on screen… this is called GODZILLA (not “Breaking Bad” the movie) after all.

The producer and fellow geek Thomas Tull said, “So I don’t know if ‘restrained’ is really the right word, but we wanted to be thoughtful about the way that we approached (GODZILLA). It’s almost like watching an old kung fu movie and you’re like, ‘can you get to the fight scene, please?’ We wanted to really avoid that.”

Kung Fu movies? Yeah, Legendary Pictures is in good hands.

Anyway, this “Cinematic Foreplay” as Edwards himself calls this teasing, really pays off in the third act. When the “God of Zillas” is finally let loose in the last 30 to 45 minutes of the film you’ll be glad this is all fiction because it looks and feels incredibly real. The scale of the battle in mid city is probably one of the most ambitious, realistic (while avoiding being too gratuitous) monumental scenes I’ve seen. With barely any dialogue, beautifully rendered images and without ever getting lost or disoriented, this boys and girls… its just pure cinema.

To this Edwards added, “If I could make a film where no one said a word, to me that’s the ultimate cinema. Dialogue is always very necessary and it’s part of human interaction, so you’re always going to have it. But I feel like when cinema’s at its best, it’s not people telling you what’s going on; instead, you’re kind of witnessing and having thoughts about what’s going on. You talk about characters in the film, and who’s the most important character. Everyone always ends up going, ‘the hero’s the most important character, and everything should be secondary to the hero.’ Actually, there’s one more important person in there and that’s the audience. The film is really about the audience and so (as a director), you’ve got to always picture that you’re them rather than the hero. And you go, ‘okay, what would I be thinking if I saw this, and how can I change or twist (my) expectation about the next moment?’ You kind of get through what you think is going to happen next, and you get pulled into the film more from that.”

Yes, we (the audience) love getting sucked into films because it only means one thing, we care about what we are watching. If we only had cared a little bit more about the human characters, this movie would have had us from all the way in the beginning of the film, not halfway through.

The direction was ballsy and I applaud Legendary Pictures for supporting a great young talent like Mr. Edwards, but a good script polish of the first half would have made this movie not just good entertainment, but a classic. Oh well, we can always hope for “Pacific Rim vs. Godzilla.”

GODZILLA roars in 3D and 2D in select theaters on May 16.