While there's no shortage of superhero movies these days, there's a monster which has as great a hold on our childhood memories and affections as any spandex-clad crimefighter.

Godzilla. And after a 15-year absence from the big screen, the big man's back with a vengeance.

From Ishiro Honda's seminal 1954 film, the enormous creature with the armoured dorsal, huge roar and fiery radioactive breath has spawned numerous film sequels, animated TV series, comic books, video games and toys.

However, in 1998 Roland Emmerich's Hollywood Godzilla was a dispensable effort, too tongue-in-cheek by half.

British director Gareth Edwards takes his monsters more seriously. Edwards had a fabulous calling card for this gig: his debut, aptly called Monsters, was a phenomenal example of low-budget, independent filmmaking, which Edwards wrote, directed and shot, and for which he created special effects on his laptop, imagination and creative ingenuity overcoming budgetary restriction.

For his follow-up, Edwards has been invited to the big league. And he doesn't disappoint. Godzilla is a no-nonsense, awe-inspiring monster movie.

It opens in 1999. In the Philippines, scientists find a giant skeleton and a fresh trail heading towards Japan. Outside Tokyo, engineer Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) is concerned about the strange seismic activity beneath his atomic plant.

He sends his scientist wife (Juliette Binoche) to investigate. And then the whole thing comes crashing down. Fifteen years later, Brody believes that whatever caused the earlier disaster has returned. His son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a naval officer, gets drawn into his father's obsession.

From those masters of suspense Hitchcock and Spielberg, Edwards has learned the horror of the unseen and the value of the gradual reveal.

The first 40 minutes constitute a slow-burn mystery, as we find the answers to Joe Brody's questions and await our first complete view of Godzilla and his two monster adversaries. This loathsome couple are pretty ferocious in their own right, making a mess of Honolulu and Las Vegas before Godzilla catches up with them for a final showdown in San Francisco, the Navy following limply in their wake.

The plotting is ropey, and there are some casting missteps. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins are the drippiest scientists I've encountered in a long while, he entering every scene as though he's just woken up, she as if she's about to burst into tears.

Cranston and Binoche are more effective, nailing their very emotional scenes, but we see too little of them; Elizabeth Olsen, as Ford's wife, is also under-used.

But Taylor-Johnson is a solid hero. And in any case, the monsters are the stars of this show.

What is so impressive is not just the CGI effects, but the imagination that informs them, leading to one jaw-dropping image after another: an aerial shot of Godzilla gliding beneath a destroyer; a nocturnal attack on a train, two soldiers trapped on the railway bridge as a monster sniffs around them; red Chinese lanterns fluttering in the wind, as two behemoths tussle in the ashen city behind them; marines parachuting into the city, floating past monsters who are too busy fighting each other to notice.

Also from Spielberg, Edwards has gleaned the importance of the human perspective, both emotional and in terms of scale, when displaying your monsters.

His grey, awful depiction of destroyed cities evokes the atomic aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shock of which spurned the original Godzilla.

At the same time, there are light-hearted reprieves, as when a boy draws his mother towards the TV with the immortal line, "Look mommy - Dinosaur".