Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Lets Godzilla Be Godzilla

Our kaiju king. Photo: Apple TV+

Because franchises are inherently an extension of the hungry maw that is capitalism, the default treatment of IP is always more. Sequels, prequels, and spinoffs, multiverses and revisitations, remakes and reboots; we keep coming up with new terms and new ways to expand recognizable properties. Recently, the results of these overextended gambles have felt like homework, an irresolution, or a creatively challenged attempt to make something uninteresting feel interesting (a building, what Princess Leia was like as a child, other words that rhyme with Billions). Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is driven by the commonly used tools of these endeavors, including a hopping-around-history plot, legacy characters used to introduce newer ones, and Easter eggs referencing other franchise entries. It’s much more successful than other IP add-ons, though, in remembering what viewers are here for and giving us what we want: Our kaiju king doing kaiju-king stuff.

Godzilla smashing! Godzilla saving! Godzilla going for a swim! Godzilla taking a nap! Godzilla serving as a horrifying-yet-adorable protector of our world! Monarch, which premieres its first two episodes November 17 on Apple TV+, is ostensibly about the same-named organization that studies and villainizes Godzilla, but the series is openly skeptical of the extra-governmental regulation and paramilitary force Monarch stands for. It’s much more invested in tracking Godzilla’s transformation from embodying fears of the atomic bomb and American scientific failure in the 1950s to representing the hazardous unknowability of terrorism, our most constant contemporaneous boogeyman, in the 2010s. That historical angle feels like Monarch doing its best to serve its two masters: Toho Co., Ltd., which owns Godzilla and distributed 33 films about the character in Japan, where Godzilla first served as an allegory for nuclear power and warfare, and Legendary, which brought the MonsterVerse to the U.S. with 2014’s reboot Godzilla, 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong. Surprisingly, the balance actually works, since Monarch takes care to ground all of these overarching concerns about what Godzilla is capable of in specific character motivations, while also offering visceral creature-feature entertainment through the hungry-for-humans Titans.

A little moment early in the series where someone scoffs at the idea that Godzilla “respects national boundaries” is indicative of what Monarch gets exactly right. It isn’t as bleak as the original 1954 Godzilla nor as playful as the franchise’s ’60s films; the same transition occurred with the more recent American releases, which started off stylishly grim with Gareth Edwards’s sophomore directorial effort and then grew increasingly spectacle-focused as King Kong, Rodan, and King Ghidorah came into the mix. Monarch walks a fine line between all those tones, offering more somber ruminations on American imperialism and nationalism in the ’50s story line, and an intermittently wacky, almost Scooby-Doo–esque energy in the 2015 plot, which features lightly absurd touches like a text-message-alert system warning people of Titan attacks with the dry phrase “massive organism approaching.”

The series has a tendency to jump around too often, and its modern-day character development is weighed down by Monarch’s need to connect the events of the 2014 Godzilla with the three subsequent MonsterVerse films. But Monarch also makes a series of smart choices that put it ahead of the usual franchise-expansion curve, like using everyday people who were affected by 2014’s G-Day to deepen the franchise’s lore, casting father-son duo Kurt and Wyatt Russell to play the same character over 60 years, and investing in the visual effects needed to sell us the Titans experience. When the series clicks, as it frequently does in the eight of ten episodes provided for review, it feels like a mid-century choose-your-own-adventure novel, the kind of pulp that immersed us in a world that felt like our own, right up until it didn’t. That precipice of make-believe is where Monarch delivers its most fun and engaging stuff, with our big boy Godzilla waiting for us on the other side.

Monarch tells two parallel story lines linked by familial and thematic connections, as well as by the Russells as the enigmatic Lee Shaw, evoking each other in their facial expressions, line deliveries, and mixture of droll sarcasm and roguish charm. In 2015, San Francisco G-Day survivor Cate (Anna Sawai) travels to Tokyo to pack up her missing father Hiroshi’s (Takehiro Hira) apartment. A year after Godzilla’s emergence, fear of him lingers (international travelers are sprayed for decontamination when coming off planes, signs with Godzilla’s image mark safety shelters, a warning system blares from newly placed speakers in public places), and Cate’s PTSD is triggered by nearly all of it. While in Tokyo, she becomes entangled with visual artist Kentaro (Ren Watabe) and hacker May (Kiersey Clemons), who used to date and have their own secrets, and learns that her father was somehow connected to the shadowy organization Monarch, which Cate remembers from her brush with Godzilla on the Golden Gate Bridge. Hiroshi’s involvement with Monarch puts a target on the 20-somethings’ backs, and to better understand why they’re being followed, the trio teams up with the elder Lee, whose theories about Godzilla and the Titans got him excommunicated from Monarch years before.

In the 1950s, Lee is a U.S. Army veteran whose assignment to escort a Monarch scientist initially seems like a punishment. Japanese doctor Keiko (Mari Yamamoto) is a hard-charging, politeness-eschewing whirlwind who doesn’t care that Lee thinks her belief in enormous creatures is nonsense, and her disinterest in helping Americans build bigger and more damaging weapons is shared by fellow scientist and monster tracker Bill Randa (Anders Holm). They want to keep Monarch a research institution; the Army funding their work sees the Titans as enemies they must destroy; and Lee is stuck in the middle, a position that turns him into the best developed character. The split-timeline narrative is often overdone in TV, but Monarch uses it well as an observation on change, mirroring the wariness and worries of Keiko, Randa, and Lee in the ’50s, as they see their research being transformed into ammunition, with the confusion and cynicism of Cate, Kentaro, and May, who understand that Monarch’s shadowy power in 2015 is primarily thanks to fearmongering and paranoia.

The cross-decade echoes between the two trios can be similarity overkill, and as the season progresses, the pacing becomes formulaic (each episode ends with a cliffhanger that will make you yell “dammit!” in both frustration and excitement) and some details get repetitive (like a certain musical cue). In those moments, Monarch feels like it knows its human characters might bore us — and those anxieties aren’t baseless. Monarch is at its most invigorating when it treats humans, regardless of their era, as often quite irrelevant to the world at large. “Miracles should be terrifying,” a kooky Japanese scientist says of Godzilla, and the series’ striking action sequences — the best thing Monarch does — emphasize the immateriality of humankind at a certain scale. The show’s visual effects and audio design are exceptional in these scenes, and they remind us of our smallness: how ineffective human bullets are against Godzilla’s scales, how many teeth lurk in a Titan’s mouth, how easily our bodies could be turned into meat. Monarch is a best-case scenario for franchise expansion because it doesn’t just indulge us, it humbles us. What’s more Godzilla than that?