From the beginning, the plot is driven almost entirely by the MUTOs. It is a MUTO who destroys the Janjira nuclear power plant, killing Sandra Brody and setting her husband on a 15-year quest to determine what happened. It is the same MUTO that later breaks free and begins wreaking havoc across the globe. And it is the discovery that this MUTO intends to mate with another MUTO (itself wreaking havoc across the American Southwest) and create many, many baby MUTOs that forms the central dilemma of the film. For at least its first two-thirds, the movie is about the MUTOs. Godzilla is relegated to serving as a deus-ex-machina, who conveniently shows up in the final act and solves the problem posed by the MUTOs.

Compare this to the many examples that have been cited as models for Edwards’s film. Yes, we don’t meet Kong until well into his 1933 film. But Denham, Darrow, and Driscoll don’t travel to Skull Island in search of a Tyrannosaurus, and the natives don’t worship a Pteranodon. From the start, the movie is always about Kong.

The same is true with Jaws. Brody, Quint, and Hooper aren’t trying to save beach season on Amity Island from the depredations of a man-eating killer whale, only to later stumble upon a Great White. No, however long it may take for us to get a good look at our Carcharodon carcharias, Jaws is always about Jaws.

Ditto Ishiro Honda’s original Godzilla, as well as Close Encounters, Alien, Cloverfield, Super 8, and so on. However long it may take for the respective creatures in these films to show their faces, they always drive the central plot. And yes, the same holds for The Third Man. Holly Martins doesn’t wander through Vienna investigating the death of some other apparently dead friend, only to run into black marketer Lime by accident.

No, as I and others have noted, Edwards modeled his Godzilla—deliberately or not—less on the structure of these films than on that of the many inferior Godzilla sequels. In those movies, like this one, some new monstrosity rears its ugly head (Ghidora, the Smog Monster, Mechagodzilla, etc.) and rampages across Japan until Godzilla shows up to restore balance. Sound familiar? For the record, I love these movies for their campy grandeur. But they are not the model I would have chosen for a $160 million reboot (nor, for that matter, the model Edwards seems to think he did choose). For a sequel? Maybe. But to reintroduce moviegoers to Godzilla as a wholly reactive figure in a movie whose plot is overwhelmingly dependent on some new, not particular interesting monsters seems a mistake to me.

But that’s just me. Obviously, many, many people liked Godzilla a lot more than I did, and I’m not trying to persuade anyone that they were wrong to do so. But as long as some discussion had arisen on the question of whether Edwards used his Godzilla too sparingly, I wanted to clarify my critique: It’s not the lack of Godzilla screen time, it’s the lack of Godzilla focus.