Just What Everyone Wants: A Godzilla Series About the Humans
Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros’ MonsterVerse—a franchise featuring Godzilla, King Kong, and additional beasts from Japan’s Toho Studios—has done a fantastic job bringing its gargantuan creatures to over-the-top life. What it has not done, however, is devise a single storyline or human character worth paying attention to, and that streak remains intact with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a live-action Apple TV+ series that’s set directly after 2014’s Godzilla. Light on destructive colossuses and heavy on dull dual-timeline drama, it’s a footnote affair that fills in trivial narrative gaps and focuses on its least compelling participants—and, in doing the latter, manages to largely squander both Wyatt Russell and his father Kurt.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is similar to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, in that it finds a little bit of space between its primary franchise tales and expands it to make room for a standalone saga. Its first two episodes directed by WandaVision’s Matt Shakman, Chris Black and Matt Fraction’s 10-part affair (premiering Nov. 17) picks up in 2015 in the aftermath of Godzilla’s rampage through San Francisco, and therefore before the iconic kaiju fought kindred “Titans” (also known as MUTOs, for Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and King Kong in Godzilla vs. Kong.
Unsurprisingly, humanity has been profoundly shaken by the knowledge that it’s no longer at the top of the food chain, and that annihilation is now an ever-present possibility. Thus, it has responded by devising various measures to prepare for ensuing attacks, from metropolitan warning systems (air raid sirens, cellphone alerts) and bomb shelters to evacuation posters, paths, and plans. Such world-building details are smartly imagined by the show, lending its fantasy a dash of believable realism.