Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Tells a Fascinating, Human-Driven Story (With a Side of Godzilla)
Photo Courtesy of Apple TV+
Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) from Jurassic World spoke the truth. When it comes to monsters, “consumers want them bigger, louder. More teeth.” This is true not just in Dearing’s world of dinosaurs, but in the adjacent MonsterVerse, where legends such as Godzilla and King Kong reside.
Bigger and badder is exactly what the MonsterVerse has provided ever since the Gareth Edwards-directed Godzilla film debuted in 2014. Since then, three more franchise films have been released with a growing roster of giant monsters (often referred to as titans, MUTOs, or kaiju) and surprise, surprise, the films were all progressively bigger, louder, and had more teeth.
While I find MonsterVerse films to be fun popcorn movies, they have almost always lacked a strong human story that could establish a critical link to its over-the-top, CGI-laden action. Modern Godzilla and Kong movies have been heavy on fun but light on humanity. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters reverses this trend, skillfully managing to do what the films it’s sired from traditionally have trouble with: providing compelling stakes for its human characters with just the right amount of monster mayhem.
We first meet main protagonist Cate Randa (Anna Sawai) as she’s arriving in Japan. A former teacher from San Francisco, her father recently died and she’s on a mission she doesn’t want. When she discovers her dad had a secret apartment in Tokyo, Cate flies to the city at the urging of her mother to investigate why. It turns out her father isn’t exactly who he seemed to be.
We learn that Cate has a half-brother, Kentaro (Ren Watabe), an artist who has a complicated relationship with a hacker named May (Kiersey Clemons). With Cate and Kentaro suddenly made aware of the other’s existence, they start digging into their father’s mysterious past with May’s help. At times, Monarch feels more like a family drama than a series based in the MonsterVerse. “A dad with an enigmatic past inadvertently gets his children to work as a team to solve the mystery surrounding his life,” isn’t exactly an atypical tagline for a family drama. While we have all seen this kind of story before, it’s never been done with a monster twist.
The digging of the determined twins leads the duo and May to Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell), an old friend of their father’s who they hope can provide some answers to a life led partially in secret. Shaw’s introduction is when Monarch really hits its stride, but we first meet the character when he’s played not by Kurt Russell, but by his real life son, Wyatt Russell, in a setting almost 60 years earlier.
There are a dizzying amount of time jumps in Monarch, so viewers are first introduced to Army Lt. Lee Shaw not in the present (the series is set in 2015), but in 1952 when he’s assigned to be a security escort for Japanese scientist Dr. Keiko Mira (Mari Yamamoto). The pair quickly join forces with cryptozoologist Bill Randa, played as a young man by Anders Holm and as an older man by John Goodman, reprising his role from Kong: Skull Island.