Warning: This review of Monarch Legacy of Monsters includes mild spoilers for the show.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Apple TV+’s new series set in the Godzilla/King Kong cinematic universe (MonsterVerse), kicks off with two giant monsters fighting each other as John Goodman’s William “Bill” Randa races between their legs during an unseen sequence in Kong: Skull Island. It’s as if the show is making an early claim: “This isn’t some small show. It’s like the movies!”
And, in practice, over the course of the eight episodes that critics were given to pre-screen, this claim holds up. The series is just like the movies. It turns out, stretching out all the MonsterVerse movies’ strengths and weaknesses into a ten-hour series makes for a show that’s as up and down as the spines on Godzilla’s back.
Over the last decade, Legendary, the studio behind the MonsterVerse, has quietly turned Godzilla and King Kong films into one of the only cinematic universes to make it out of the Great Cinematic Universe BoomTM. Now they’re taking their first non-animated swing at television with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a series that looks to flesh out the history behind the secretive organization that monitors, studies, and controls the giant creatures roaming the earth in the MonsterVerse. Its origin is a surprisingly family-focussed one that features three generations of the Randa family, stretching back to the aforementioned Bill Randa and the establishment of Monarch in the ’40s and ’50s and landing with his grandchildren in 2015, just after Godzilla’s first attack in 2014’s Godzilla.
Related: Monarch: Legacy of the Monsters Season 1 Trailer Offers New Look at Apple TV+ Godzilla Show
Set up to tell dual stories, the series jumps back and forth between these two time periods. In the more recent past (we’ll call it the present), we follow the story of Cate Randa (Anna Sawai) and Kentaro (Ren Watabe) as they discover that they are siblings. Their father, the son of Bill Randa, had two secret families along with a secret mission involving his ex-employer, Monarch. They’re joined by May (Kiersey Clemons), a computer wizz with a mysterious background as well, and Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), the only surviving founding member of Monarch, as they try to solve the mystery of their dad’s disappearance and just what Monarch is up to. This takes them on a journey around the world as Monarch attempts to track them down for incredibly nebulous reasons.
Concurrently, as the episodes jump back and forth in time, we learn of Monarch’s founding as Dr. Keiko Mura (Mari Yamamoto), Lee Shaw (Kurt Rusell’s son, Wyatt Russell), and a young Bill Randa (Anders Holme) come together to form a sort of X-Files-for-giant-monsters organization in the U.S. government, Through their work they discover Godzilla while working through a love triangle severely complicated by giant monster tracking and the government’s desire to blow things up with nuclear bombs. Their story fleshes out some of the details we’ve seen hinted at throughout the MonsterVerse films with a surprising amount of connections and callbacks to said films. If anything, this half of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters shows that Legendary has had a plan since the beginning.
Monarch‘s dueling storylines are actually a master stroke for a cinematic universe that is content to pump out a movie every few years and keep things at a pace. In one series, the show fills in two entire backstories for Monarch, expanding two eras in one tight show instead of, say, spreading itself thin over a plethora of content on multiple platforms like some other universes may or may not have. There is a world where these two tales are told in their own shows, filled with more fluff than is needed, and fall flat on their faces. Instead, despite some failures we’ll discuss later, the series feels tight, and dual narratives work to open each other up. Whether or not people are all that interested in the history of Monarch for in-universe reasons is debatable but showrunners Chris Black and Matt Fraction weave just enough intrigue for it not to matter.
Much like the films, Monarch succeeds when it treats its subject seriously, focusing in on the impact that Godzilla’s battle had on the world, San Francisco, and the people in it. This may be a universe where the center of the earth is hollow and full of giant monsters but Monarch is refreshingly focussed on the human side of things. The first episode features a litany of little background examples of how the world has changed since Godzilla’s attack and plays heavily into Cate’s PTSD from being present during G-Day and watching some of her students die. The show also deals with American militarism as it unpacks the government’s attempts to kill Godzilla and how the fallout from that led to G-Day and the death of thousands. Yes, the show takes some big swings and those swings are what make it work.
That is when it is swinging. Where the series starts to falter is when it steps back into monster/disaster movie comfort zones and away from these themes, turning into an often bog-standard action series. The cliche of a small group of conveniently connected people being forced to save everyone takes over, pushing some of the better storylines out of the way for entire episodes and delivering a series that doesn’t feel much more creative than your average disaster film. The “present” storyline, featuring Monarch as the big bad and a rambling quest to find a missing father, is a total mess and even more convoluted within the world of the cinematic universe where Monarch was previously established as a general good for humanity. Thankfully, the same can not be said for the past sections, which keeps its humanity front and center, despite reveling in some cliche as well. As the two storylines crash into each other more fully with Shaw connection to the two time periods, both start to build to what should be an interesting conclusion.
Without the final two episodes, where most likely the majority of the monster fighting will occur, it’s hard to say if Monarch truly can live up to the other aspect that the films do well: kaiju battling each other. Sprinkled throughout the first eight episodes are some solid lesser-monster action sequences but there’s a notable dip in the CGI quality here and they’re never as grandiose as anything we see in the movies. Of course, they can’t be considering the next major attack takes place after the series occurs in Godzilla: King of Monsters so it will be interesting to see how they replicate the standard final quarter of the films or if they instead take the bold move of drilling down into the true human legacy of these monsters on the world.
Related: How to Watch All the MonsterVerse Movies In Order
One other minor positive quality that Monarch: Legacy of Monsters has is the casting of Wyatt Russell as the young version of Kurt Russell’s character. With the popularity of de-aging technology, it was probably a big temptation to use CGI to de-age Russell and let him play himself in his youth. However, this is a much better solution both in terms of quality of performance and the show’s budget. It’s honestly refreshing not to have to stare at some uncanny valley of a face sucking the reality out of scenes already packed with CGI monsters or, more importantly, surprisingly human emotions.
The true message here, though, is that despite the series’ cinematic opening and callbacks to the films, Monarch is not about the monsters but the people. That’s a concept that wouldn’t work in a standalone film where everyone is coming to see Godzilla knock around with King Kong but in an expanded universe it’s incredibly interesting even if the show isn’t as committed to it as it should be. Obviously, people want monsters in their MonsterVerse but when you expand your universe you can expand the kind of monster stories you tell, even those that are only impacted by monsters.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is clearly trying to play into its title hard. It not only literally tells the story of the legacy of Monarch itself, the Rand family’s involvement, and how this cinematic universe came to be but also starts to unpack the metaphorical legacy that giant monsters killing and destroying an entire city would have. It is when the series is doing the latter that it truly shines and turns into something you wouldn’t expect from a film featuring giant ice dog things and a glowing sky beam, but, unfortunately, it veers away from this too often. When the show is playing it safe, it may be entertaining but it’s never truly interesting.
All that being said, when Godzilla does make his first appearance in the show, it’s hard not to still be excited by it. Monsters destroying things is pretty awesome.
