I’m a pretty casual Godzilla fan. I hadn’t seen the original, Ishiro Honda-directed classic until just a few years ago, or any of the many, many Japanese movies that followed. I had, on the other hand, seen the mediocre 1998 Hollywood version (which, if nothing else, gave us an incredibly catchy Jamiroquai song that is now stuck in my head from just thinking about it tangentially) and the 2014 reboot. Over the last couple of years, though, I’ve grown pretty fond of the big guy – from the original nuclear allegory to Hideaki Anno’s satirical take on Japanese red tape. Some of the most recent entries haven’t been great: I kinda loved the 2014 film when I saw it on a giant cinema screen but didn’t think it held up well when I watched it at home, and the Netflix-Toho CG-anime films so far have been extremely rough going – look out for my review of the just-released Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle next week.

But this? This looks good. Sure, I feel a little wary because the trailer for the 2014 film was likewise impressive, with that jaw-dropping sequence where the US soldiers dive through cloud cover around the absolutely enormous Godzilla. The actual film largely played coy with him, though, and in the end was somewhat lacking in kaiju action. Godzilla himself looked great, but the other creatures lacked the long cinematic history of Godzilla’s usual array of foes and allies. Not so this time. The trailer alone teases Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah, and let’s just say I’ll feel sorely undersold if there isn’t a lot of kaiju-on-kaiju action come 2019.

There are other reasons to be hopeful, too: as well as Toho loosening its grip on the aforementioned kaiju, which Legendary Pictures weren’t allowed to use in the previous film, the breaking news alongside the trailer is that composer Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica, Black Sails, God of War) will get to incorporate the original 1954 theme.

It’s also hard not to endorse the central thesis of the trailer: that the planet is dying, humanity is an infection, and unleashing giant monsters from the depths of time is the only way to save the planet (even if it means wiping most of us out). Long live the King.