‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Stretches a Minor Mystery Over a Godzilla-Sized Spectacle
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Godzilla has come to represent a lot of things to a lot of people. Our lizard king first and foremost expresses mass fears surrounding nuclear fallout. More recently, he’s symbolized the catastrophic, segregating effects of global terrorism. But sometimes, to some people, he’s just a big ol’ lonely boy — his only friends are fragile little dolls, his contemporaries all want to kill him, and pretty much everyone would rather he just go away for good.
Except audiences. Sparked by Gareth Edwards’ 2014 “Godzilla,” Americans have shown up for Toho Co. and Legendary’s Monsterverse movies to the tune of nearly $2 billion in worldwide box office. Even “Godzilla vs. Kong” — which not only came out during the pre-vaccine COVID era, but was also available via HBO Max at the same time — drew almost half-a-billion dollars. Clearly, there’s an appetite for monster battles that’s nearly as big as those monsters.
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Enter “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” the franchise’s first live-action TV series. (“Skull Island,” an animated Kong spinoff, premiered on Netflix this summer.) Developed by Chris Black (“Severance”) and comics writer Matt Fraction, the 10-episode season takes place after Edwards’ “Godzilla” and before the 2019 sequel “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” — sometimes, long before. While most of the action takes place circa 2015, another timeline tracks the founding of the monster-studying, -tracking, and -controlling (LOL) organization known as Monarch, which takes place way back in the ’50s.
A new narrative wedged into a preexisting timeline and an origin story? In the same show? Anyone who’s sat through recent MCU, Star Wars, and more forced franchise extensions should be hearing alarm bells right now, and “Monarch” certainly suffers from a wonky, time-hopping structure that sets up some questionable plotting. To Black and Fraction’s credit, they overexert themselves trying to create stakes through characters, including an age-defiant Lee Shaw played in the past by Wyatt Russell and the present by his father, Kurt Russell. (Despite Lee being around for least eight decades, only 35 years separate the two actors — a mathematical blip the show is self-aware enough to acknowledge, if not explain.) Not everyone leaps off the screen like the Russells, though, and ultimately, “Monarch” struggles to master its most predictable flaw: Godzilla is the real star, and he’s not around that much.
Expecting epic battles in every episode is both unreasonable and inevitable. Fights like Godzilla vs. the MUTOs simply cost too much and take too much time for TV; fitting in one per episode over a 10-episode season would be insanely expensive, let alone allowing the already-besieged special effects artists enough man hours to execute the necessary rendering. “Monarch” tries to compensate by debuting new monsters at a steady clip, but watching them explode out of the earth and chase around our series regulars doesn’t create the same awe-struck excitement or suspense as Godzilla — and since that’s what audiences are used to seeing in the Monsterverse movies, it’s hard to feel satisfied by eight hours of all-too-brief teases.
Perhaps “Monarch” will let them fight in the finale, but it’s a long road to get there with this group. Starting in 2015, one year after Godzilla’s demolition of San Francisco, Cate (Anna Sawai) is on her way to Tokyo, where her late father kept an apartment for work. Expecting to be in and out, she’s instead overwhelmed from the second she steps foot in Japan. At first, it’s the country’s Godzilla defense system. Yellow and green signs with images of Godzilla are everywhere, guiding people to shelter if Tokyo’s early warning system goes off, but there are also massive missiles positioned on abandoned bridges and more military equipment spread throughout the city. For Cate, who barely survived San Fran’s “G-Day,” it’s a lot to take in, but soon, it’s the least of her concerns.
When she meets Kentaro (Ren Watabe) and his ex-girlfriend May (Kiersey Clemons), they learn of her father’s ties to Monarch and begin investigating what he was doing all these years, bouncing between continents. Eventually (end of Episode 2), that leads them to Lee, who’s new to these kids but not to us, thanks to an earlier flashback. Lee used to be in the military (before Monarch), and he led a team of two married scientists who wanted to research Titans. Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), a Japanese doctor, and Bill (Anders Holm), an American scientist, are hot on the trail of these monsters, and Lee is their de facto bodyguard. While their first encounter spoils more than I care to in this review, the rest of their arc takes place in the lead-up to that fateful day in Kazakhstan.
“Monarch’s” story, while evoking sound themes of generational trauma and global communities, is weighed down by this kind of confounding time-hopping. Character histories are held back to substitute for juicy twists, and their emotional lives often feel restricted by how they’re unveiled (or portrayed). Motivations are revealed after spending hours and hours with each person. For much of the season, it’s unclear who’s an antagonist and who’s a hero, save for the folks who are simply too out of the loop to know what’s going on. Structuring episodes around mysteries so opaque you’re not even sure what you’re waiting to find out is it’s own problem, but “Monarch” also manages to become formulaic in its action scenes. Don’t get me wrong: Most of the monsters look great, and Godzilla (in his smattering of appearances) is particularly striking. But when they show up and what they’ll do is rarely a surprise.
Perhaps that’s part of the point. If there’s a big-picture takeaway to “Monarch,” it’s to remind us of humanity’s infinitesimal impact on time and space. Godzilla could squash any of us, at any moment, and that would be that. His enemies could overrun this Earth and bring on a second age of the dinosaurs (so to speak). All our bureaucratic bickering and grand plans for society may not matter one bit in the face of the climate crisis or a nuclear disaster. Across 10 hours of a story this convoluted, filled with characters who never fully connect, it’s easy to feel our own insignificance — but it would still be nice to see a great big Godzilla-sized spectacle to distract us.
Grade: C+
“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” premieres Friday, November 17 on Apple TV+ with two episodes. New episodes will be released weekly through January 12 (Episode 10).
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