What I really wanted from the newest Godzilla movie is simple: to see the big green guy swing King Ghidorah around by his three necks, hammer-throw-style. It would be a delightful callback to a time when the series was basically a version of the WWE in latex monster suits.

Sadly, expressive throwdowns like that don’t happen in King of the Monsters, but director Michael Dougherty comes a lot closer to it than previous English-language Godzilla movies (admittedly, it’s a limited pool). The balance between titanic brawls and terrified citizens is redistributed in the right direction; as any die-hard fan of the franchise will tell you, we’re not meant to focus on the drama of the helpless humans caught in the fray. Those characters are there to serve a function; they act as connective tissue between fight scenes and offer a sense of scale and perspective for the damage being wreaked. On that score, King of the Monsters works: it’s much more of a creature feature than its 2014 predecessor, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla.

Nevertheless, the one thing that American versions of Godzilla have yet to capture is the existential terror of a nuclear attack. The Japanese series grew out of an attempt to grapple with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where Godzilla isn’t something to be controlled, just something to be survived. So it’s hard to ignore how quickly the American movies promote Godzilla to “friend” status when he demonstrates his usefulness in the bigger fight for the planet. If you were ignorant of history and only had the movies from each nation to go on, it wouldn’t be hard to guess who dropped the bomb and who the target was.

The story in Dougherty’s film picks up before the end of the first movie, zooming in on a family torn apart by Godzilla’s battle with the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms (MUTOs) in San Francisco. Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) and Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) lose their son in the destruction. We then cut to five years later: Emma works for the secret government organization Monarch and is living near the site of a slumbering monster with her daughter Madison (Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown). Emma is hell-bent on developing a gadget that will help pacify and control the beasts that Monarch has found across the globe, but it’s clear her grip on reality is slipping.

An eco-terrorist (Charles Dance) shows up to steal the gadget and unleash the beasts, based on a cleanse-the-earth-of-nasty-humans ideology that’s basically Thanos-lite. Meanwhile, Mark is brought in by Monarch to help track Emma, Madison, and their captors. A globe-trotting quest ensues, and more than a dozen monsters end up rubbing the sleep from their eyes, including some franchise favourites: the pterodactyl-like Rodan, the insectoid Mothra, and of course the archvillain Ghidorah, he of the triple dragon heads and lightning breath.

The visuals do a lot of heavy lifting; there’s something oddly validating about seeing so much money thrown at characters and scenery that were once charming costumes and miniaturized sets. I loved the Monarch underwater base and the gigantic flying command centre/dreadnought, as well as the scene where the Monarch team goes to visit Godzilla’s underwater home inside an Atlantis-like sunken city. That said, it did set up a groan-worthy sequence with Ken Watanabe’s character that had a tall order to fill: be like Obi-Wan deactivating the tractor beam in A New Hope, while also letting Watanabe pet Godzilla (uh-huh), and help write the actor out of potential sequels.

While we’re on the topic, you can follow a rule of thumb when watching King of the Monsters: any sequence with humans will feature either lazy screenwriting, terrible visual clichés, or both. I got plenty of ironic pleasure out of the “you’d better take a look at this” lines, and out of how Emma takes the time during her crazy-person-manifesto Skype call with Monarch to cut to some relevant B-roll to support her arguments.

But for every moment like that, you have a pretty shot of Mothra bathing the world in ethereal light from her wings, or a satisfying sequence of Godzilla ripping off one of Ghidorah’s regenerating heads. The heroes’ aircraft is called the Argo, after the ship that bore the mythological Jason on his journeys. And the soundtrack works in both the 1954 movie’s iconic theme and the Blue Öyster Cult song with the line, “Go, go, Godzilla!”. Hell, the very thought of Bradley Whitford yelling, “Is it just me, or has he been working out?” or “Godzilla’s about to go thermonuclear!” forgives a lot in my books.

In an era where the biggest movies in the world trade mostly in inspiring displays of heroism and hope, it’s nice to have a series that offers a different blend of emotions: a mix of dread and bombast that’s hard to find in other genres. The 2014 Godzilla got the dread part right, while teasing us with the bombast, and this new film flips it around. We get a lot more of the rollicking kaiju action we always wanted with this kind of Hollywood budget. Time (and overseas box office) will tell whether we see a follow-up that gets the proportions just right.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters gets three stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Dougherty doesn’t have quite the same grasp of scale and perspective that Edwards did in the previous film, but there are a few choice shots that make Ghidorah loom over humans in a terrifying way.

• You can see why Millie Bobby Brown was cast (her nascent star power and her experience playing girls who stand up to authority), but she’s largely wasted in the final cut.

• I’d love to read an in-universe article on how the United States keeps its military and Monarch going with three of its major cities in ruins.